Big brother is flipping your burgers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6683365.stm
You don’t really need to read the article. The gist is this: McDonalds UK is trying to convince the Oxford English Dictionary that it should change or eliminate the definition of “McJob.” Apparently it’s “insulting to the 67,000 people who work for” the company in Britain. Also, “82% of its workers would recommend working at the company to their friends.” Because, you know, they’d be fired if they answered differently.
The thing about the OED is that it’s descriptive, not proscriptive. It’s about how people do talk, not how they should talk. I can’t verify it right now, but I’m willing to bet that the good people at Oxford are publishing definitions for a great number of offensive and insulting words. This is what they do. It’s one of the vastest undertakings in the history of humanity to catalogue and continuously update the structure of the English language. These people take great pride in giving us a tool like that. Information
The intent, apparently, is to create democratically mandated language. Democracy, in this case, is a bad idea. That’s tyranny of the majority. If people invented the term McJob, it becomes a part of the language. No one can stop that. One day it may become a rarely used—or differently used—part of the language, but it never leaves the lexicon completely. And that’s what the OED is for.
Above and beyond that, the Oxford University Press is a private limited company, not beholden to any intrusion by the government, and regulated in a fashion similar to that of a charity. I can’t even begin to tell you how much that pleases me. They will suffer an absolute minimum from this kind of frivolity. No constituents to please, no shareholders to make wealthy.
I guess the point is something like “suck it, McDonalds.” Efforts to regulate the way people speak have been phenomenally unsuccessful in the past, George Orwell’s brilliant commentary on it aside. The true success stories are things like the queer movement and the immigrant culture of France, or the scholastic acceptance of Ebonics. Language has no interests. It’s the purest expression of memetics in action, and the best evidence that ideas do propagate in a viral, evolutionary process.
And in that way, I feel it would be a crime to suppress information in that fashion.
You don’t really need to read the article. The gist is this: McDonalds UK is trying to convince the Oxford English Dictionary that it should change or eliminate the definition of “McJob.” Apparently it’s “insulting to the 67,000 people who work for” the company in Britain. Also, “82% of its workers would recommend working at the company to their friends.” Because, you know, they’d be fired if they answered differently.
The thing about the OED is that it’s descriptive, not proscriptive. It’s about how people do talk, not how they should talk. I can’t verify it right now, but I’m willing to bet that the good people at Oxford are publishing definitions for a great number of offensive and insulting words. This is what they do. It’s one of the vastest undertakings in the history of humanity to catalogue and continuously update the structure of the English language. These people take great pride in giving us a tool like that. Information
The intent, apparently, is to create democratically mandated language. Democracy, in this case, is a bad idea. That’s tyranny of the majority. If people invented the term McJob, it becomes a part of the language. No one can stop that. One day it may become a rarely used—or differently used—part of the language, but it never leaves the lexicon completely. And that’s what the OED is for.
Above and beyond that, the Oxford University Press is a private limited company, not beholden to any intrusion by the government, and regulated in a fashion similar to that of a charity. I can’t even begin to tell you how much that pleases me. They will suffer an absolute minimum from this kind of frivolity. No constituents to please, no shareholders to make wealthy.
I guess the point is something like “suck it, McDonalds.” Efforts to regulate the way people speak have been phenomenally unsuccessful in the past, George Orwell’s brilliant commentary on it aside. The true success stories are things like the queer movement and the immigrant culture of France, or the scholastic acceptance of Ebonics. Language has no interests. It’s the purest expression of memetics in action, and the best evidence that ideas do propagate in a viral, evolutionary process.
And in that way, I feel it would be a crime to suppress information in that fashion.
posted by Maximillian @ 4:07 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home