"April Fool!" is not, unfortunately, what McDonald's will say because this is true and they've done it before.

McDonald's is trying to get U.K. dictionaries, including the renowned Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to change its alleged "out-of-date" definition of McJob to something more positive than the OED's "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector."

Apparently, some clown at McDonald's has been hitting the special sauce a bit too much. Here is the reasoning, bearing the official seal of Mayor McCheese:

1. Dictionaries are like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass. They just make up their own meanings for words. Let's change McJob to something we want.
2. We failed with America's Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in 2003. Let's keep trying.
3. The OED is a historical dictionary and thus will contain earlier meanings of words forever. Let's be sure to tell people that this is not a pointless exercise.
4. McJob, as popularized by Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X, probably doesn't refer to fast-food jobs. It's a job you do to pay the bills. There's little or no advancement, but you can forget about it when you leave for the day: bartender, clothing store salesclerk, etc. Fast food jobs usually don't pay enough to be McJobs in this sense. The meaning seems to come from the same source as McMansion. A certain type of job and a certain type of large home are like a certain type of restaurant epitomized by McDonald's: They're everywhere and not fancy. Let's ignore how tangential we are in this.

This just in:

• Johnson & Johnson has decided that a "band-aid" solution now means a solution that helps you get better.
• Duncan said "yo-yo" dieting means speedy, fun dieting.
• Hormel Foods decreed that "spam" E-mail means tantalizing E-mail you can't wait to consume.

Fortunately, that last part is an "April Fool!"

Die, spammers! Die! . . . is how I used to feel. Then E-mail filtering improved, and I didn't get quite so much spam E-mail, or unsolicited commercial E-mail (UCE).

But then I got a blog.

The floodgates opened. I was awash in spam comments. Knee-deep, then drowning in a blue river of links to prescription drugs, adult entertainment, and online gambling. Then I ran out of water metaphors and was simply getting a rather large amount of spam. This was despite using a key-word filter and moderating comments as "spam."

That whole "death to spammers" idea was sounding pretty good again. I realized, however, that I had misplaced my anger. I found it in a coat pocket with a crumpled receipt, but I also realized I shouldn't hate the spammers. Spammers are lowlifes, yes, and deserve to be prosecuted. But they're just trying to make money. The real problem is that they are making money because enough idiots are buying things through spam. Scientific American (April 2005) estimated that  just with E-mail, a spammer could make money with a response rate of only one in 100,000 (0.001%).

They're the ones ruining it for the 99,999's of us. We must stop these spam sponsors before they kill again! Sorry, I was still thinking in death metaphors. I mean, we must stop these spam sponsors before they, indirectly but culpably, waste more of our time and increase our ISP and Web-host costs. But how?

Obviously, if people say that they bought things via spam, we can take away their computers. (And give the computers to charity; this isn't vigilantism.) It probably won't be quite that simple, but spam enablers have already proven their stupidity. With some, "Have you ever bought anything from spam?" should do it. With people who can, say, change their screensaver, try: "Hey, do you know any good online gambling sites? Oh, and by the way, how did you come across that link, Total Stranger on the Street?"

It won't be easy, but we must speed up the Internet by thinning the herd of the weaker gazelles, the ones slowing us down by, er, stopping to eat the lions' spam. And, uh, thus encouraging the lions to put out more spam, which, um, most of us don't eat. So the lions eat the spam eaters, which is actually good for us—except that eating spam makes them carnivore gazelles, and uh . . . .

Meanwhile, I'll work on that last metaphor. Oh, and for those who might be a different kind of stupid: Don't really take other people's computers.

Yawn. Oh, excuse me. I meant to post this days ago, but I've been too tired from Congressionally mandated sleep deprivation. Yes, it's that time again in America, Daylight Saving Time (DST).

Has this ever happened to you? It's around noon, and you have some idea of what time it is but not exactly. You stop someone on the street and ask the time. That person says, "1:00."

Of course not. Who says "one colon zero zero"? Plus, no one's going to put down a cellphone to talk to you. But my point is, that person is only lying in one instance. All of us are lying to each other and to ourselves for months about what time it is. If it's one o'clock DST, go ahead and tell people it's one o'clock. But wink like you're hinting to police it's what the hostage-taker (the government) wants you to say.

Since this is a mass delusion, it shouldn't stop with hours. This is temporal Mardi Gras, Chronoval. Anything goes! If you have a school or work assignment due on Monday, turn it in on Tuesday. It's not late. It's DST. If you turn twenty-one (legal drinking age) in a month, go to a bar now with your I.D. and say you're twenty-one. It's DST. If you've got one more year until parole, run toward the prison gate today. The armed guards will understand. It's DST.

Now DST is even more bizarre. It's gone from six months of the year (twenty years ago) to seven to now eight. We're on standard time for only eighteen weeks a year. Since when is 35% of the time considered standard? If you work two days a week, are you a full-time employee? If you watch eight of twenty-two episodes of a TV show per season, are you an avid fan? If you eat meat every lunch and dinner but not breakfast, are you a vegetarian?

Yawn. I'll let you know—when my brain wakes up.

Here I am. Zip! I just left, watched every video on YouTube, and came back. Didn't notice, huh?

I've finally gotten DSL. Not only is it fast, but so was getting it. First, I needed an Ethernet network card/adapter for my computer. (Why do I need adapters and cables to tap into the ether?) The card would be shipped two days later and take three to five business to arrive. Zip! It shipped the same day, and I got it three days after that.

Next, I ordered the DSL service. The provider would confirm the date to upgrade my phone line on their end within two days, then do the upgrade, and then ship the DSL modem and software, which would take three to five business days to arrive. Zip! They both did the work and shipped the next day, and I got the stuff in only one business day. (OK, then there was a problem with the initial connection to the Internet that required calling India, but let's not ruin our theme.)

I feel like partying like it's 2003! But I'm actually in the future. My DSL is 25 times faster than my dial-up was, so each day now is like 25 days. I've had it eight days (since February 20, 2007), so that makes it 200 days later, or September 16, 2007. Darn, I missed summer entirely. But in a week and a half it'll be summer again. Yay!

On the down side, a year goes by in just over two weeks; that means a lot more Christmas presents to buy. Plus, before this calendar year is out, I could be dead of old age and in a body bag. Zip!

Anybody seen my eyelash? I lost one last Sunday. I don't just mean an eyelash came loose from my eyelid. Nor do I mean I rubbed my eye, got a lash on my finger, and it disappeared—the lash not the finger. (That finger hasn't gone missing in months. We had a talk about that.)

And I certainly don't mean I lost one lash from a vast collection of all my lashes that've ever come loose, preserved in jars color-coded for "Left Eye" (black) and "Right Eye" (red) and labeled with the year. And decorated with pink lace if it was a special lash-year like 1997. (Wow, a whole decade's gone by since then. . . .)

No, I mean I took a shower, looked in the mirror, and noticed an eyelash on my eyeball. Then I tried to get it out—the lash not the . . . well, you know. But the lash migrated to the inner corner. The curve of the lash perfectly matched the curve of my eyeball. Nothing worked. Not rubbing. Not blinking. Not pulling the top lid over the bottom one. (I think that's to cause tears, which I really hope is supposed to rhyme with "dears" not "dares.") A couple hours later I checked. The lash had moved up a little, but I still couldn't get it out. Later in the day, I tried again. Nothing. Tried again later. Nothing. Then that evening I looked, and it was gone.

Where did it go? Maybe it went off on an adventure. Or to fight crime. The Lash of Liberty! I suppose its only superpower would be poking the villain in the eye, but sometimes that's all you need. The moral would be that we all just need to do what we can to make the world a better place. Plus there'd be a breakfast cereal: Lash Loops. Slogan: "I'm loopy for Lash Loops!"

Well, that's silly. Maybe I'm thinking these things because the lash migrated up into my brain. No, I read there's a structure in the head that stops that kind of thing from happening. But what if getting an eyelash in your brain makes you THINK you read such a structure exists? Well played, Eyelash. Well played.

No, I can still think of other things. Cars . . . blinkers. Baseball . . . batting. Raft . . . logs. Ha! Lashed together. Hmm . . . .

Don't worry, I'm probably fine. No need to be mascaraed. Er, scared. The Lash of Liberty will protect me. AND stay crunchy in milk.

Numb3rs, oh you wacky math drama. In the recent episode "Take Out," we see Millie (chair of the Physics, Math, and Astronomy department, played by Kathy Najimy) reading the book Life of Pi.

Pi is actually the name of the book's main character, not the number pi. Remember geometry class? The class where it was easy to get away with doodling? Pi relates a circle's diameter to its 3-times-that-plus-a-little-more circumference, and pi's decimal part (3.14 . . .) never ends or repeats, so it's "irrational."

Oh, and which episode of season three was "Take Out"? 3.14!

I think that's cute, but what does pi think of it? It's hard to predict; he's irrational. He's probably had a hard life. Little 3.14 . . . was obviously fairly close to his father, 3, but his mother, 4, was more distant. 4 has had her own problems. She's shunned in China and Japan for sounding like the word for "death" (English: four / death, Mandarin: si4 / si3, Cantonese: sei3 /  sei2, Japanese shi / shi). In Japan, though, they also use the native word yon for "four," so 4 can still get sushi. She loves her raw fish.

I think young pi felt unwhole, and he didn't know where he was going. He made some crazy decisions—like starting an illegal lottery, a numbers racket. This should've gotten him arrested, but there was never proof it was him.

"Witness descriptions?" he'd taunt. "Are you sure you don't want 3.1415926535897932383 . . . ? Or maybe 3.14159265358979323845 . . . ? I'm 3.14159265358979323846 . . . !" Then he'd laugh three times, "Ha ha ha," plus a little more.

One day he met e (2.71828182845904523536 . . .). She was also irrational but had a good job in the banking world, calculating compound interest. They had a lot in common, like the 12th, 16th, 17th, and 20th digits of their decimals. They started dating, and things began progressing—geometrically for him, exponentially for her. She taught pi that you can be irrational and still feel complete. They fell in love, got married, and had the average 2.1 children. No, wait, they adopted baby 2.1.

Pi has made a respectable name for himself in geometry and science. However, he still enjoys getting a little crazy. Like bringing more than 15 items through the supermarket express lane and explaining that he knows 15 personally and she wouldn't mind. But pi still wouldn't eat raw fish. Who's the irrational one, Mom?

Addendum: Speaking of 4, I noticed that this is my fourth post. Hey, who's that guy in the black hood with the scythe? It think it's—

Did anyone see American TV host Kelly Ripa on The Late Show with David Letterman (February 7, 2007)? She mentioned her sister-in-law, who's also named Kelly. Who's the other Kelly? Her brother's wife? Her husband's sister? No, she's her husband's brother's (her brother-in-law's) wife.

But that relationship requires TWO marriages, so shouldn't it be her sister-in-law-in-law? Or perhaps, her sister-double-in-law? Not to be confused with her sister-Dublin-law, which would be her husband's leprechaun's wife. Oh, there's a big ceremony, with the shamrock girl, the faerie-ring bearer, the gifts of pots of gold, and the traditional wedding march: "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

Meanwhile, aunts and uncles marry people that we just call "uncles" and "aunts." Are you my father's brother, or are you married to my father's sister? Ha, I don't have to care, you vague relative. But oppositely, husbands and wives of cousins are just husbands and wives of cousins. Ha, you might as well be married to a friend of mine, or to a leprechaun. Do you have a green wedding dress? 'Cause you're going to need it.

Happy 2008! No, that's not a typo, and this post's "February 2007" time stamp isn't wrong either. But even if you read this right after I post it, it'll probably be next year by then. Time is flying.

Somehow I blinked and missed January. That's an exaggeration. Actually, January lasted about two weeks. At this rate it'll be New Year's in less than six months. It'll be summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, and we'll be having New Year's on the beach with the kangaroos and the koalas and the duck-billed platypuses and those other egg-laying mammals, the echidnas. (What's with that egg-laying mammal business anyway? Pick a team and play for it, I say.) Or maybe you still have to be in Australia to get summer AND bizarre animals at New Year's. There's also that whole time-moving-faster-making-it-still-be-winter thing. But that's a trivial matter for the guys in the tech department.

The speeding hasn't stopped with January either. From the time I meant to post this until now, two whole days have gone by. It's a brand new week. The English language has evolved, and it's unrecognizable to me. I'd worry that you couldn't understand what I'm typing now, but by the time you read it you'll have invented super-translators. Not machines but superhuman translators—that lay eggs.

Hello, Gentle Reader.

I'm Kevin (languageandhumor). My two biggest interests are language and humor. (Uh oh. I may have revealed my Americanness with that spelling of the word humor. Think fast. Petrol. Lorry. "Gaolhouse Rock." Whew, that should do it.) I write a blog called Language and Humor Blog, which deals with language and humor in the news and some weird news stories.

This here Language and Humor Musings (mini-blog) will be less structured. This'll be more of a window into my mind. It's similar to noticing an abandoned house, walking up to the porch, peering through the dusty window, and— What the . . . ? There's something moving around in there. What IS that thing?!

That's probably the feeling you'll get. Hopefully, you won't flee in fear—because fleeing in panic would probably be faster.

Thanks for stopping by. (By had almost gotten away. How it got out of its cage is still a mystery.)

Kevin