Commentary: McSpeech & McThinking

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/m...rticle&sid=597


Commentary: McSpeech & McThinking


While their food fattens Americans, their advertising starves the national language.
By Gary Corseri

The president of McDonald?s recently huffed and puffed a letter to the publisher of Merriam-Webster?s Dictionary. The president?s bad hair day resulted from Merriam-Webster having the gall to include the neologism ?mcjob? in its latest edition. As one might surmise, a ?mcjob? is a low-paying, dead-end job.

Leaving aside questions of censorship for a moment, you gotta wonder, Where?s the beef?

Wasn?t it McDonald?s, after all, that transformed that perfectly fine word ?nugget? into their own succulent, fried-oil, cholesterol-hugging ?mcnugget??

McDonald?s Big Mac CEO doesn?t get it. Language is a river always changing course because life changes and we need new words to navigate the shoals and rapids. The river flows or it stagnates.

Madison Avenue has been so effective at the game for so long, we often confuse primary meanings with secondary ones: too many kids don?t know that a mustang is a horse, a corolla part of a flower. Our military jargonists have also played the game long and well: whether you ?exterminate with extreme prejudice? or simply blow someone?s head off, the end result is the same. ?Collateral damage? and innocent victims suffer the same fates. If language changes from the top down, it must also change from the bottom up. Sometimes those bubbling-up changes are the only way the common folk can register complaint, malaise, or wry unease with the way things are. It?s also called free speech!

Big Mac has failed to perceive the handiness of a new prefix that at once encapsulates and diminishes. In our current state of mcculture, Big Macs in our mcgovernment and mcmedia have few qualms about bombarding the unwary with a constant stream of weapons of mass distraction. (And you thought Britney?s missile-firing hips were harmless?) Those who shape the dialogue?the public discourse, the ?marketplace of ideas??largely determine the outcome. Language matters vitally and any attempt to squelch meanings by fiat, as Big Mac intended, requires public scrutiny?if not ridicule.

We?ve got mcpundits telling the folks they really oughtn?t to see a show about the Reagans. The mckiddies, we?re forewarned, could never distinguish fact from fiction and the legacy of a great mcleader should not be tarnished. (Apparently the mckiddies should have no problem telling fact from fiction when it comes to the latest Play Station or Terminator orgy of murder and mayhem. In those cases, the argument shifts to parents? responsibility: we expect the harried parents to safeguard their mcdarlings.)
Censorship, according to my own Merriam-Webster?s, is related to the Latin word for assessment. We all assess, judge and define our world, and we may even censor ideas we dislike. But democracy mandates a free exchange without pre-censorship. So does wisdom.

?Whoever controls the information,? Orwell warned, ?controls the imagination.? And there?s the rub. Whenever the mccorporate state impedes the flow of information by shucking the meaning of words, or by voiding sacred words like ?freedom,? ?honor,? ?good? and ?evil? by facile use and over-use, then the great riverbeds go dry, we lose the connections to our deepest thoughts and feelings; we even cease to imagine how much better life could be.


Gary Corseri has published two novels, A Fine Excess: An Australian Odyssey and Holy Grail, Holy Grail. His articles, fiction, drama and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook and about 100 other publications.

Posted Saturday, December 20, 2003