Designing a vocabulary, part 1
Back in 2003, McDonald’s campaigned to have the meaning of the word “McJob” changed. Oh yes, it’s a real word, one that actually appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.”
While McDonald’s battled fiercely to have the definition changed, they were ultimately unsuccessful, prompting CNN to declare that “‘McJob’ is a word that’s here to stay.” While this is all well and good and feels like a triumph for those of us who cringe when we think of monolithic corporate chains, by this point you’re probably wondering what, exactly, the implications of this news (non-)story are for designers and practitioners of media. It isn’t that design jobs and entry-level media jobs are, in fact, McJobs (though I know it can certainly feel that way sometimes to young people just breaking into the business). The object lesson here is actually one of semantics, because it seems that we lack consensus on the formal, operational definitions of several critical words that we bandy about carelessly on a daily basis.
