20 April 2007
We’re all familiar with bad translations into English. They’re a staple of many comedy routines. But this one reported by MSNBC takes the cake.
Bad Chinese Translations
20 April 2007
We’re all familiar with bad translations into English. They’re a staple of many comedy routines. But this one reported by MSNBC takes the cake.
In Passing: Robert Barnhart
14 April 2007
Robert Barnhart, lexicographer and editor of the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology and other works, passed away on 9 April at the age of 73.
His obituary in the Journal News, the local paper for Putnam and Westchester counties in New York, can be read here.
McJob And The OED
28 March 2007
Numerous media outlets over the past week have reported that the McDonald’s corporation is up in arms over the inclusion of the word McJob in the Oxford English Dictionary and other British dictionaries.
The OED, which added the word to its online third edition in March 2001, defines McJob as:
An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.
David Fairhurst, McDonald’s chief people officer in northern Europe, said of the definition, “We believe that it is out of date, out of touch with reality and most importantly it is insulting to those talented, committed, hard-working people who serve the public every day. It’s time the dictionary definition of McJob changed to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime.”
McDonald’s says that it is engaging in a public petition to get the OED and other dictionaries to change their definition.
This isn’t the first time that McDonald’s has objected to how a dictionary defines McJob. In 2003, McDonald’s then CEO Jim Cantalupo objected to Merriam Webster’s definition of the term as “a slap in the face” of the company’s employees.
The 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (published in 2003) defines the term as:
A low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.
Now, almost all English-language dictionaries are based on descriptive principles. They don’t define words as they “should” be used. Rather, they define words based on how those words are actually used by professional writers and the public. Lexicographers gather citations of a word’s use, analyze them, and synthesize a definition based on how the word is used in those citations. And if a word is found in a major dictionary, it is almost certain to be in widespread use—or at least have been used by significant writers or speakers. Dictionaries don’t have room to include frivolous words and even on-line dictionaries with no page limits have limited editorial time that is better spent on words that dictionary readers will actually need. So a word like McJob is not included for fun or because the editors have a political point to make.
The term McJob dates to the mid-1980s. Its first known appearance in print is in a headline in the 24 August 1986 Washington Post:
The fast-food factories: McJobs are bad for kids.
There was an earlier use of McJob by McDonald’s as a name for a program to hire the disabled. From the Los Angeles Times of 29 July 1985:
For instance, the McDonald’s fast-food chain recently began a training program for the handicapped in the San Fernando Valley called McJobs. McDonald’s has hired a dozen people after the two 10-week training programs held so far.
The slang sense of the word recorded by the dictionaries is only tangentially related to the 1985 training program for the disabled. They are both based on McDonald’s habit of trademarking terms beginning with Mc-, but there the connection ends. The slang sense is not based on the 1985 use by McDonald’s, but rather on the perceived low status of employment at the fast food chain.
Corporate protests of dictionary entries are nothing new, but usually they are related to whether or not a term is considered a trademark. Trademarks that enter into common use, become “genericized,” lose their status as trademarks and can cost companies dearly. Xerox, for example, is in a continual fight to maintain the trademarked status of its name and does not want the name used as a generic term for photocopying.
Even Wordorigins.org has been subject to corporate lobbying. In our case it was by Google. In this case, Google was quite reasonable and never threatened any type of legal action. They simply objected to the definition of the verb to google as “to search for something on the World Wide Web.” Google wanted the definition to read “to use the Google search engine to search the web.” I happily compromised on “to search for something on the World Wide Web, particularly to search using Google’s search engine,” mainly because it more accurately reflected usage than my original wording.
The McDonald’s web site does claim that McJobs is a trademark, but from the web site there is little evidence that the term is in active use by the company. There are three appearances of the term on the site: in the list of claimed trademarks, in the title of a podcast where it is used in the sense of a job at McDonald’s, and in a reference to the training program for the disabled. But McDonald’s does not seem to be fighting a trademark battle here.
Instead, McDonald’s seems to be engaged in an attempt to bolster their corporate image, but in this case an exercise in shooting the messenger. The problem isn’t the dictionary, the problem is that McDonald’s employs people at very low wages and no fringe benefits to speak of in mind-numbingly dull jobs that impart little or no useful skills for more advanced employment. This business strategy has netted them billions in profits. The problem isn’t that dictionaries are depicting them badly, it’s that McDonald’s is just not a very nice place to work. They could fix the problem, but that would undoubtedly mean a reduction in profits. The situation is one of their own making and if they’re unwilling to change, they shouldn’t complain when others accurately describe it.
Will McDonald’s efforts result in a change in the definitions? It is unlikely. Lexicographers are quite resistant to lobbying efforts. They are continually inundated with entreaties from cranks and intellectual property lawyers about this term and that word. If anything, McDonald’s is only making the dictionary editors look skeptically at any real evidence that the term might be used in a different sense, fearing that any such usages exist because the corporation planted them.
If a publication published a study claiming that McDonald’s food has unhealthful concentrations of fat, sodium, or whatever, McDonald’s would not respond by circulating a petition in protest of the study. No, they would counter the study with evidence that the levels of fat or sodium were not all that high. Or they would add a line of salads to their menu.
They should respond in a similar manner to such dictionary definitions. Instead of a petition, how about collecting citations of McJob being used in a positive sense and submitting the list to the dictionary? Or raising the salaries of its employees and aggressively advertising a program to promote ambitious line workers to management positions? One does not change public perception by changing the dictionary. Rather, one changes the dictionary by changing public perception.
McDonald’s could take a page from how Google approached Wordorigins.org. They disputed my definition on the basis of it not accurately reflecting how the word was actually used. They prompted me to re-examine uses of the verb and I ended up concluding that they were partially right. The verb was used largely, but not exclusively, in the sense of using the Google search engine. As a result, the revised definition could help them in any potential future trademark dispute, albeit perhaps not as much as they might like, and the readers of this site got a more accurate definition of the term. Everybody won.
alright v. all right
24 March 2007
Is alright all right? Or is it an abomination.
Fowler, who despite his being invoked as a prescriptivist icon is usually pretty reasonable in his commandments, rejects alright and seems to be a major source of the objection to the word. In his classic 1926 Modern English Usage, Fowler writes:
all right. The words should always be written separate; there are no such forms as all-right, allright, or alright, though even the last, if seldom allowed by the compositors to appear in print, is often seen (through confusion with already & ALTOGETHER in MS.
But times change and so does what is considered acceptable in standard English. Robert Burchfield, in his 1996 updating of Fowler’s work injects a class distinction into the usage:
all right. The use of all right, or inability to see that there is anything wrong with alright, reveals one’s background, upbringing, education, etc., perhaps as much as any word in the language. Alright, first recorded in 1893 [...] is the demotic form. It is preferred, to judge from the evidence I have assembled, by popular sources [...] It is commonplace in private correspondence, esp. in that of the moderately educated young. Almost all other printed works in Britain and abroad use the more traditional form.
The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) simply notes that it is “a frequent spelling of all right.”
Pam Peters in her 2004 Cambridge Guide to English Usage indicates that there are subtleties to alright that are frequently ignored by commentators, and takes a swipe at Burchfield:
The spelling alright is controversial for emotional rather than linguistic or logical reasons. It was condemned by Fowler in a 1924 tract for the Society for Pure English, despite recognition in the Oxford Dictionary (1884-1298) as increasingly current. But the fury rather than the facts of usage seem to have prevailed with most usage commentators since. [...] Dictionaries which simply crossreference alright to all right (as the “proper” form) typically underrepresent its various shades of meaning as a discourse symbol. It may be concessive, as in Alright, I’ll come with you—or diffident, as in How’re things? Oh alright—or impatient as in Alright, alright!. None of these senses are helpfully written as all right, which injects the distracting sense of “all correct.” Those who would do away with alright prefer to ignore its various analogues, such as almost, already, also, although, altogether, always, which have all over the centuries merged into single words. Objections to alright are rarely justified, as Webster’s English Usage (1989) notes, and Burchfield (1996) only makes a shibboleth of it. [...] At the turn of the millennium, alright is there to be used without any second thoughts.
On this side of the pond, things are similarly muddled.
Bryan Garner, in his 1998 Dictionary of Modern American Usage, is categorical in his rejection of the word:
Alright for all right has never been accepted as standard in AmE. Still, the one-word spelling may be coming into acceptance in BrE.
Yet, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961) states:
In reputable use although all right is more common.
The American Heritage Dictionary (2000) sides with Garner, but is somewhat less categorical:
Despite the appearance of the form alright in works of such well-known writers as Langston Hughes and James Joyce, the single word spelling has never been accepted as standard. This is peculiar, since similar fusions such as already and altogether have never raised any objections. The difference may lie in the fact that already and altogether became single words back in the Middle Ages, whereas alright has only been around for a little more than a century and was called out by language critics as a misspelling. Consequently, one who uses alright, especially in formal writing, runs the risk that readers may view it as an error or as the willful breaking of convention.
As usual, however, Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) gives the most exhaustive treatment in an entry that runs nearly two pages. The conclusion:
Is alright all right? The answer is a qualified yes, with these cautions. First all right is much more common in print than alright. Second, many people, including the authors of just about every writer’s handbook, think alright is all wrong. Third, alright is more likely to be found in print in comic strips, trade journals, and newspapers and magazines than in more literary sources, although it does appear from time to time in literature as well.
Alright is indeed a fairly recent development, appearing only at the end of the 19th century. There are much earlier uses, but these faded from the language long ago. There is the Old English ealriht and Chaucer wrote in his c.1374 Troilus and Criseyde:
Criseyde was this lady name, al right.
After Chaucer, the phrase all right, in whatever spelling, seems to vanish from the language. It pops back up in Shelley’s 1822 Scenes from Goethe’s Faust:
That was all right, my friend.
The merged word first appears in the Durham University Journal from November 1893:
I think I shall pass alright.
Reaction against the merged form kicked up in the opening years of the 20th century and, as we have seen, has not abated since. It is clear, though, that alright is a common spelling on both sides of the Atlantic. The relatively rarer use of alright in print is due almost entirely to proofreaders and compositors, as it is often seen the handwritten manuscripts of printed works, but is absent from the final, published versions. Alright cannot be rightly called an error and there is nothing inherently wrong with the form, but all right can be legitimately preferred for consistency of style or to avoid letters to the editor from outraged readers.
And perhaps the most important factor in determining whether alright is acceptable or not is that the Microsoft spell checker does not flag it as an error. This gives millions the justification to use the term with impunity.
