SHYSTER, MCJOB, etc.

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Thanks, Gerald, for a serious, sober response to a serious question. 

Despite its etymology, I've never treated SHYSTER as a taboo word, but then 
my personal tastes tend to run against the acknowledgment of taboo constraints, 
and if what you are saying is that many normal, sane people will actually be 
offended by the very use of SHYSTER, then I'll file that information away in 
my connotations bank and try to be judicious.

As for the mysterious putative "miserableness" of "McJob," however, I can't 
imagine that anyone would think of it as a taboo word. In fact, I can't imagine 
that anyone would find it objectionable on any grounds (except maybe 
newness). And, as you note, there has been no adult communication here about such 
grounds thus far.

As for the legal huffing and puffing of McDonalds concerning their apparently 
having registered "McJob" as a trademark: I'm no lawyer, but from what I do 
know about US trademark law I find it difficult to believe that they can really 
be serious about taking legal action against the dictionary maker. For one 
thing, a dictionary maker who enters "McJob" in a dictionary is not using it as 
a trademark, they are merely reporting on the results of their scientific 
investigations. The use of the term in the media in a nontrademark way is so 
overwhelmingly numerous that any lexicographer would have to agree that the 
dictionary maker's entry is scientifically correct. Often dictionary makers do 
publish notice of the registration of a trademark as a part of their definitions, 
but they are not legally required to do so, as far as I know, and as someone 
else noted a week or so ago, McDonalds in this case would not find such a notice 
very flattering.

I suspect that the main reason McDonalds made threatening noises about McJob 
is just that they are forced to give the appearance of vigorously defending 
their trademark. That is to say, they have to put their objections to the 
dictionary entry on the record--otherwise, their lack of action could be used 
against them in court in some unrelated case. As many ADS-L-ers know, McDonalds 
claims not just "McJobs," "McNuggets," etc., but at least one court has ruled that 
they actually own the "Mc-" prefix. Their victory in that case (in which a 
motel chain was not allowed to use the name "McSleep") was somewhat 
controversial at the time (see Lentine and Shuy's excellent article on the case in 
AMERICAN SPEECH several years ago). I suspect that McDonalds is rather sensitive 
about anything that starts with "Mc-".



In a message dated 12/9/03 8:54:13 PM, gcohen at UMR.EDU writes:


> Uh oh. Unless I'm misreading the response below, it answers Ron Butter's 
> question with an insult. But the question about what constitutes a "miserable" 
> word is a very legitimate one. Indeed, someone campaigning against alleged 
> laxness in language should welcome the opportunity to clarify a term of his 
> that is called into question.
> 
>     I've done considerable work on the term "shyster." Now *there's* a 
> miserable word if there ever was one: highly insulting and deriving  ultimately 
> from the German vulgar word for excrement (via British criminal slang).  And 
> yet, if the word were magically removed from the English language today, our 
> language would be the poorer for it.
> 
>      So the questions remain: Does a scale of goodness or badness exist for 
> the individual words in a language? How does one decide the degree of 
> goodness or badness of any given term? And absent objective criteria in this regard, 
> should the opinion of any one individual on the subject carry more weight 
> than that of anyone else?
> 
> Gerald Cohen
>