Talk:McJob

I'm pretty sure this term was popularised, if not invented, by Douglas Coupland in his book w:Generation X. Perhaps it was slang in his area already. In any case, here are the earliest examples I can find on Usenet with Google Groups:
 * McJobs: misc.headlines - 29 May 1991 by Alex McPhail:
 * McJob: sci.edu - 19 Jan 1992 by dallas kachan:
 * Mc Jobs: alt.dear.whitehouse - 23 Jul 1994 by Joe Bissot:
 * Mc-job: alt.recovery - 10 Jan 1996 by ceri howard:
 * Mc Job: alt.support.depression - 19 Jan 1996 by owen thomas:

&mdash; Hippietrail 03:07, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * No, it was already old enough in 1986 to be used even by the Washington Post, not known for coinages:

The OED definition, which cites a 1986 story in The Washington Post, is: "An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector."


 * Also, i propose that this lemma be changed to mcjob; there is no logical or lexicographic reason to spell this as if it were a proper noun or a trademarked term.


 * Precedent in major dictionaries is no excuse and only a sign of increasing and shocking sloppiness and/or illogic in these publications in deferring to popular usage in capitalisation although this clearly often does not make a distinction between proper and common nouns. In addition, popular usage was obviously first referring to jobs only at McDonald's, so there was even a "logical" reason for capitalisation according to the inherent illogic of the English capitalisation tradition exemplified by sociology/Egyptology (pro egyptology or at least Egypt-ology). And McWords at is also erroneous as well as most of the terms it lists that were not coined and are not used by McDonald's.


 * What is perhaps even more shocking or at least surprising than the sloppiness of the OED and other major reference works in this case is that McDonald's lawyers were/are so incompetent, that they implicitly threatened to sue Merriam-Webster for including a living word of the English language, but didn't think of demanding that the term be spelled as what it is, a common noun, instead of something exclusively McDonald'sian. (Even Hormel Foods had enough knowledge of English spelling or enough intelligence to get a competent linguistic expert's opinion to demand the differentiation SPAM/spam.) I will contact major dictionaries and McDonald's about this (these) incredible goof(s). --Espoo 11:47, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

edit rollback
Restored formatting to Paul's version, as per WS:ELE. --Connel MacKenzie T C 19:04, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

warning ... McDonalds on the warpath
According to this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6469707.stm McDonalds are trying to change the definition of McJob. Keep alert for any sneaky changes to the definition here at Wiktionary.