I know you'll know some examples

NPR's "On the Media" will be covering the McJob news next week.

n his 1991 novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland coined the term "McJob," to denote – as the OED now defines it – "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects." Now McDonald's is waging a battle to get dictionaries to redefine the term. Of course, McDonald's isn't the only trademarked name to be co-opted in an unflattering way. There's Spam. And Muzak. We'll talk about the phenomenon on the show this weekend, but we'd like your help. Can you think of other examples?

Share them in the comments here and with "On the Media."

McRidicUlous

McDonald's has actually launched a lobbying effort to get the dictionary definition of "McJob" changed.

We believe that it is out of date, out of touch with reality and most importantly it is insulting to those talented, committed, hard-working people who serve the public every day," wrote David Fairhurst, chief people office in northern Europe, in a letter seeking support for change uncovered by the Financial Times.

"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."

Not exactly how dictionaries work, but I guess execs don't have the benefit of witty Erin McKean presentations to point that out to them.

Longest entry in the OED?

Languagehat points out that it recently changed from set to make. From the OED's revisions page:

For many years the verb to set has been cited as the longest entry in the OED. But a recheck shows that it has at last been toppled from this position. The longest entry in the revised matter is represented by the verb to make (published in June 2000). However, it is quite possible that set will regain its long-held position at the top of the league of long words when it comes itself to be revised.

In ranking order, the longest entries currently in the online Third Edition of the OED are: make (verb - revised), set (verb), run (verb), take (verb), go (verb), pre- (revised), non- (revised), over- (revised), stand (verb), red, and then point (the noun - revised).

Poetry — by definition

A new blog, Webster's Daily, celebrates found poetry from the first edition of Noah Webster's
American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

Some examples:

Blink, n.

Blink of ice, is the dazzling whiteness about the horizon, occasioned by the reflection of light from fields of ice at sea.

Holloa, exclam.

A word used in calling.

Among seamen, it is the answer to one that hails, equivalent to,

I hear, and am ready.

Hope, n.

A sloping plain between ridges of mountains. [Not in use.]

But what does it all mean?

I quite enjoyed the New York Times Magazine feature on the OED.

The O.E.D. is unlike any other dictionary, in any language. Not simply because it is the biggest and the best, though it is. Not just because it is the supreme authority. (It wears that role reluctantly: it does not presume, or deign, to say that any particular usage or spelling is correct or incorrect; it aims merely to capture the language people use.) No, what makes the O.E.D. unique is a quality for which it can only strive: completeness. It wants every word, all the lingo: idioms and euphemisms, sacred or profane, dead or alive, the King’s English or the street’s. The O.E.D. is meant to be a perfect record, perfect repository, perfect mirror of the entire language.

Employees are hard at work on the third edition of the dictionary. The third edition! (The first edition was presented in 1928, the second in 1989.) And it's not expected to be done for a couple of decades.

The New Yorker's Nov. 6 edition has a piece I've not yet read on Noah Webster that sounds promising:

There's an equally odd and charming piece by Jill Lepore about the lexicographer Noah Webster, a man who worked alone, unnumbed, for twenty years, literally turning circles inside the hole of his doughnut-shaped desk, consulting volumes of dictionaries of some twenty languages. I would guess he was not much good at meetings.

''Outside his family," Lepore writes, ''nearly everyone who knew him found him insufferable, and strangers who thought they admired him usually didn't: they'd mistaken him for another Webster. (If he had published an autobiography, it would have been called I Am Not Daniel!)''

When Webster first floated the proposal for a dictionary of the American, rather than English, language in 1820, he was drubbed by the critics, who thought the Americanisms were vulgarisms, ''a disgusting collection of idiotic words" (such as ''wigwam" and ''lengthy.'')

By the time the dictionary was published, populism was on the rise-- and with it the love of the words of the common man--so the book became revered.