where does the S go, in the plural Egg McMuffin? and other puzzling questions

[vida morkunas]

reprinted (re-pixellated) without impunity from The Chronicle:

McLanguage Meets the Dictionary

http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i17/17b01401.htm

By DENNIS BARON

McDonald's wants Merriam-Webster to take its McJob and shove it. McDonald's
CEO Jim Cantalupo is steamed that the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary defines "McJob" as low-paying, requiring little skill,
and providing little opportunity for advancement. Three years ago The
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language ran a similar
definition, and The Oxford English Dictionary includes "unstimulating" in
the mix of descriptors branding McJobs as dead-end.

Cantalupo calls such negative definitions "a slap in the face" to American
restaurant workers. Although he insists that the word is not part of the
nation's vocabulary, Cantalupo admits that McJob is no stranger to
restaurant trade journals. He wants everyone -- including Merriam-Webster --
to stop using it.

Merriam-Webster announced that it was sticking by its definition, which
reflects the way McJob has been used for at least 17 years. Dictionary
editors regularly include words far more controversial and offensive because
their job is to record how the rest of us use our language, and we don't
always use it politely. Jim Cantalupo isn't the first person to object to
what he feels is bad language in the dictionary, nor is he the first to tell
lexicographers how to define their words. For example, in 1872 A.S. Solomons
protested G. & C. Merriam's definition of the verb "jew" as "to cheat." And
in 1997 a grass-roots protest insisted that Merriam-Webster drop the word
"nigger" from the dictionary. The NAACP joined that protest, calling for the
dictionary to remove any reference to race in the word's definition.

As someone whose heritage is both Jewish and South Asian, I'm particularly
sensitive to the negative racial and religious vocabulary that gets tossed
around both casually and vindictively. But it's not the job of dictionaries
to root out offensive language or to change social attitudes, and most
lexicographers are careful to warn readers when words are venomous and
demeaning.

Merriam had carefully marked the negative use of "jew" as insulting, and
though the dictionary maker removed that verb from its Collegiate
dictionaries, "to jew" can still be found in Merriam-Webster's unabridged
version, where it carries the label "offensive."

Merriam-Webster took the complaint against "nigger" seriously as well,
revising the definition in the new Collegiate to reflect the nonracial
contexts where the word sometimes occurs, as well as the fact that "its use
by and among blacks is not always intended or taken as offensive." But the
dictionary also affirmed its earlier conclusion that the word is typically
"expressive of racial hatred and bigotry."

Like others who would clean up our dictionaries, Jim Cantalupo, anxious to
protect his company from bad press, will find that his linguistic protest
comes too late. Most people know exactly what McJob means without a
dictionary. Wildly successful business phenomena like McDonald's have a way
of working their way into our language as well as our culture. In the early
20th century, Coca-Cola sued to prevent the marketing of other drinks with
"cola" in their name, winning judgments against upstarts like Chero-Cola,
Clio-Cola, and El-Cola but losing against Cherry-Cola, Dixie-Cola, and Koke,
all of them long gone. Coke also lost its bid to prevent 7-Up from calling
itself "the Un-Cola." One result of Atlanta-based Coke's domination of the
cola industry is that "coke" and "co' cola" have become generic terms in the
South for any soft drink. Another soft drink, Moxie, won a suit against the
competitor Noxie, only to see "moxie" enter the language as an ordinary word
meaning energy, guts, or chutzpah. Shredded wheat, thermos, and zipper all
began as trademarked terms that morphed into everyday words as well.

Manufacturers want the names of their products on everybody's lips, but they
don't want those names to become everybody's property, so like McDonald's
they try to regulate the way we use those names. The Xerox Corporation still
takes out ads, including one in The Chronicle of Higher Education last
month, admonishing readers that Xerox with a capital X can only be a proper
noun (Xerox machine) or proper adjective (Xerox copy). Book and journal
editors usually pay attention to these warnings, but people have been using
"xerox" (lowercased) as a noun or verb -- regardless of the brand of
photocopy machine they're using -- since the 1960s.

Like Coke, Xerox, and zipper, McDonald's is a victim of its own success: The
world's largest fast-food chain is seeing its trademark adapted into
ordinary, noncommercial language, often in an unflattering way. We've gone
way beyond McJob: There's McPaper, a designation for USA Today that's been
around since that newspaper made its debut (the oldest OED citation for
McPaper is a 1982 New York Times article). Other Mc- derivatives include
McDonaldize, McDoctors, McTherapy, McWorld, and McMansion, as well as
McDonald's itself, defined positively by the OED as "any service,
organization, etc., likened to the McDonald's chain in some respect, esp. in
operating in a highly efficient, standardized manner."

Ever eager to burnish its public image, the McDonald's Corporation once
hired a public-relations firm to ascertain the correct plural of the Egg
McMuffin. Perhaps they were hoping to gain approval for Eggs McMuffin, on
the analogy of the more upmarket eggs Benedict. But that quest went nowhere.
As far as I know, the company never ruled on what eaters of the Egg McMuffin
should order if they want more than one.

Dictionary makers themselves can squabble over the ownership of words. The
name "Webster's" was the subject of a bitter dispute in the early 20th
century, with the courts ruling that G. & C. Merriam, the lineal publishing
descendants of Noah Webster's dictionaries, did not have exclusive rights to
the name. "Webster's" in everyday English has been synonymous with
"dictionary" since Noah Webster hit it big in 1828, but perhaps because they
don't want to get embroiled in further litigation, dictionaries don't record
that generic meaning of the name.

Although many people look to dictionaries for guidance in proper word use,
these essential reference books aren't regulatory mechanisms as much as they
are compilations of language practices. Dictionaries don't tell us how to
use our words, they describe how we use them. Certainly the makers of
dictionaries must pay attention not just to linguistic nuance, but to the
impact that their work has on the course of a language. But if
lexicographers allowed individuals or pressure groups to dictate
definitions, then our language would be reduced to mere McWords: an English
high in calories, low in meaning, requiring little skill, unstimulating --
in short, dead-end.

Dennis Baron is a professor of English and linguistics at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Volume 50, Issue 17, Page B14


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