McMerriam-Webster’s dictionary added “McJob”, then removed it from some versions due to pressure from McDonald’s. The following articles are all lifted from BoingBoing.

Original article:

McDonald’s should get a dictionary and look up “trademark”
McDonald’s misunderstands the nature of dictionaries: that is, to observe the language as she is spoken and document her. McDonald’s is up in arms over Merriam-Webster’s inclusion of “McJob” in its current edition. Naturally, McD’s has trumped up a completely groundless trademark claim to back this up. Trademarks don’t let you control how people speak — they only allow you to stop other commerical outfits from confusing your customers; certainly, they don’t give you the power to stop the reporting of the fact that English speakers use “McJob” to describe a crappy job.

Walt Riker, a spokesman for McDonald’s, said the Oak Brook, Illinois-based fast-food giant also is concerned that “McJob” closely resembles McJOBS, the company’s training program for mentally and physically challenged people.

“McJOBS is trademarked and we’ve notified them that legally that’s an issue for us as well,” Riker said.

(Note: Every time I post here about trademarks, I get a flurry of emails from people patiently “explaining” to me that you need to sue everyone who utters your trademark or risk losing it; without covering ground I’ve run over before, suffice it to say that this is wrong, and it’s a fairy tale that trademark lawyers scare their clients with in order to drum up more business, and I don’t care if your in-house counsel or nephew-in-law-school swore it was true, it’s not. Really.) Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:45:19 AM permanent link to this entry

Update 11/11:

Merriam-Webster 0wnz0red by McDonald’s
Jonas sez, “It appears that dictionary producer Merriam-Webster’s has yielded under pressure from McDonald’s. Yesterday, the word ‘McJobs’ disappeared from their web site’s page with “new” words in the new edition. I have links to the google-cached version with the word still there – and a pdf-print of it – , and to the ‘cleansed’ page (and the code).” Link Terry sent a letter to the dictionarians and got this back: “You’ll be glad to know that we have not removed the entry for McJob from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (which is available on-line by subscription at www.Merriam-WebsterCollegiate.com). Although we did alter some marketing text on our main Web site that quoted the entry, the dictionary itself remains unchanged.”

posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:32:01 AM permanent link to this entry

Update 11/11, #2:

Merriam-Webster stands its McGround
Despite having taken down its Web defintion of McJob, Merriam-Webster has now publicly announced that it will not remove McJob from the print and pay-for-click versions of the dictionary.

“For more that 17 years ‘McJob’ has been used as we are defining it in a broad range of publications,” the company said, citing everything from The New York Times and Rolling Stone to newspapers in South Africa and Australia.

Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:56:21 PM permanent link to this entry