The brain-trust at McDonald’s apparently don’t understand the purpose of a dictionary. I’d tell them to go look it up, but the resulting recursive loop might destroy the universe.

Fast-food giant McDonald’s has launched a petition to get the dictionary definition of a McJob changed.

The Oxford English Dictionary currently describes a McJob as “an unstimulating low-paid job with few prospects”.

McDonald’s says this definition is now “out of date and insulting”, and claims a survey found that 69% of the UK population agree it needs updating.

Dictionaries don’t define the meaning of a word, they try, so far as they can, to reflect the meaning(s) of a word. It is entirely possible that a job at McDonald’s is hugely rewarding, and I’m a fool not to chuck what I’m doing now and rush to my nearest McD’s. That doesn’t have anything at all to do with what ‘McJob’ means. Words mean what societies choose for them to mean. Those meanings can change over time (gay, clue, quaint), or be entirely invented (quiz, blog, bogoflops), but there’s only one way of voting for the meaning of a word, and a petition ain’t it.

Eighteen-year-old Samantha Larson reached the peak of Mount Everest on May 16th and became the youngest person to have ever climbed all the world’s “seven summits”

What the hell have I been doing for the last 36 years?