填空题

2004 is a presidential election year in the United States. Job outsourcing (the loss of U. S. jobs to countries with low cost labour structure in Asia) by U. S. corporations is a hot topic this summer. Many Americans are worried that if this trend continues for a few more years, the only jobs left in the U.S. would be McJobs.
41. ______
In the popular mind, McJobs are for teenage burger flippers, who are trying to earn some pocket money. Certainly to those who are dreaming the American dream, a McJob is NOT a career builder by any stretch of the imagination.
This kind of negative use of the word makes one person in the U. S. very mad, Jim Cantalupo, chairman and CEO of McDonald’s. In his letter to the lexicographers, which was published in Nation’s Restaurant News, he called the definition of the word in the dictionary "inaccurate and insulting to restaurant workers everywhere".
42. ______
If McDonald’s couldn’t accept satire as the price of fame, it should have launched its protest for the use of McJob a long time ago. Sure, twenty years ago, the first use in the Nexis database wouldn’t have raised hackles and provoked a personal response from the company’s CEO.
43. ______
But McJob in the "robotic, dumb" sense popped up in the Washington Post just a year after the first use of the word, with an editorial piece declaring "McJobs Are Bad for Kids". Later, the word was adopted by economic commentators, though they disagree, even till this day, on whether such low-wage jobs are truly dead-end soul killers or stepping stones to fulfilling careers, but both camps still call them Me Jobs.
Doug Coupland, a noted linguist, often gets the credit for coining the term McJob, however, he did not join the chattering surrounding the word until 1991. In the past twenty years, the use of the term spreads rapidly across the country. In 1993, the American Dialect Society, at its annual meeting, voted it the "most imaginative" of the year’s buzzwords. The use of McJob in print peaked in 1994, with more than 100 U.S. citations; in the years since, it has levelled off, never again topping 50 mentions per year.
44. ______
Because of concern with job losses among Americans during this political season, McJob citations in American newspapers and magazines are up sharply in the past twelve months, on track to break the 1994 record. If the word does get its buzz back, chairman Cantalupo would have helped a great deal. His public complaint can only keep the debate sizzling and the tally of McJobs usage rising as a result.
45. ______
[A] But it remained common enough to warrant inclusion in the American Heritage Dictionary (2000) and the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
[B] According to the new Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, McJob means "low-paying and dead-end work" with no future.
[C] It was an innocent play on words in a 1985 news story on the labour shortage at the burger restaurant chain. In order to attract more applicants, the TV commercial began with "Ronald McDonald has a McJob for you", with no scorn intended whatsoever.
[D] That is the kind of corporate strategy you would expect from a circus clown, not the CEO of the mighty McDonald’s.
[E] Not only had it created dozens of its own words, such as McScholar (McDonald’s awards scholarship money to its college-bound employees as a form of encouragement), but the company prides itself on the kind of standardization such names suggest, prescribing routines and recipes practically down to the number of seeds on a burger bun.
[F] Who wouldn’t For example, the Disney Co. can’t be pleased that "Mickey Mouse" means trivial or simple in everyday American English, as it has been since the 1930s. And the American Legion probably wishes someone else had come down with the now called Legionnaire’s disease
[G] McJobs, launched in 1984, is the company’s own programme for training people with disabilities. To the chairman of the burger chain, the definition of the word is therefore also an insult to the disabled as well as trademark infringement. (When the word is used in the plural form, it is a recognized trade mark. ) Ironically, nobody seems to have warned him that a head-on attack on the dictionary editors might help perpetuate the very usage of the word he wants to stamp out.

【参考答案】

A