I was a precocious reader. My mother read to me, but she never made an active effort to teach me to read. She never pointed at the words and had me sound them out (she was NOT hooked on phonics), so I suppose I picked it up by watching the words and their sentences as she read to me. But I do not hear words when I read them or write them, not in her voice or any other voice. Words happen to me silently. I write them down; I speak them. Sometimes I even see words in my dreams, whole sentences marching across the darkness letter by letter, like news across a ticker. But I do not hear them. It is as if my mother tossed me into a deep pool of words from which I am still trying to save myself. I am under words the way a drowning man is under water. It is quiet down here.
And here is another word, as if I need one more word. This is one I did not know until today: mondegreen. A mondegreen is a misheard lyric in a song, what someone described as an "aural malapropism." It is a word that dates back to an article written for the Atlantic in 1954 by a woman named Sylvia Wright. The first mondegreen I remember hearing was as a child when on of my younger siblings set out to sing "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" and sang "Oh come all be hateful" instead. There are mondegreens and mondegreens. Allegedly the most famous is, "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear," which should be, "Gladly the Cross I'd bear." The Center for the Humane Study of Mondegreens -- which is San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll's longterm project -- has some real doozies.
And there is news of another word: mcjob (McJob if you supersize it), which the Oxford English Dictionary has included in the language with the definition: "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector." As someone who has had a few of those in his life, and whose children and wife have too, I think that definition pretty much covers it. Now, McDonald's in the United Kingdom (that's where the OED is published too) is starting a petition drive to have the definition changed to something more positive. In fact, they would like to have the definition of McJob (they ALWAYS capitalize it) "changed to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime." That is likely to be skills that will at least last long enough for a worker to make the move from the mcjob to Wal-Mart greeter. They can petition all they want to, but my guess is that mcjob will go on meaning what mcjob means right now. If you say you have a mcjob, people know what you are saying. Mcjob will keep on grimly meaning what it means until the people who have mcjobs find the need to make it mean something different. Words change through people using them, not by petition. And even McDonald's is not likely to change the OED.
What about McMansions? Have those made it into the OED yet?
Almost every friend I have has a mcjob, which I understand is a popular trend among artists & musicians. One of my mcjob friends informed me that because my job is interesting and professional, it qualifies as a "jobby job," which is the term people with mcjobs use to describe jobs that are not mcjobs. I wonder if jobby job has made it into the OED yet.
Posted by: Erleichda! | June 03, 2007 at 09:57 AM