McLanguage change - i'm lovin' it - stative verbs

Stative verbs - McLanguage change

Hi and welcome to another great grammar lesson from New English Academy. I’m your host, Giles Parker, and today we’re going to learn about stative verbs, and in particular, how that famous burger chain, McDonalds has shown that grammar rules can change. This lesson is aimed at intermediate learners but anyone can learn something new from the vocabulary or the grammar, or just practice listening and reading comprehension. As usual, you can get the full online interactive comprehension, vocabulary and grammar explanations, the games and the tests at our website NewEnglishAcademy.com. Let me know if you like this lesson or any of the others by sending me an email or rating this on iTunes or Stitcher Radio. The more I know what you guys like, the better I can make lessons for you.

Here in the beautiful Green Heart of Italy, I recently saw a sign of an invasion from another culture – a large McDonalds sign with its golden arches next to a main road advertising a new McDrive restaurant. I’m surprised because fast-food isn’t very popular here. My neighbors ask – why do you want to eat fast? The next nearest McDonalds is about 50 minutes’ drive away.  McDonalds is being very brave in trying to start a restaurant here. Just my two cent’s worth, but I don’t think it will succeed here.

American fast-food chains moving into other cultures isn’t really new news, but did you know that McDonalds has also had an effect on the English language too? This really means it is a successful business, just like that new verb ‘to Google’. Recently McDonalds disagreed with the Oxford English dictionary about the meaning of ‘McJob’ which still means a job that doesn’t pay well and that has little future. In the USA, you can have a large house that is not well built and costs too much and that your friends call a ‘McMansion’.  You can find this in the Oxford English Dictionary too! These new words are nouns. But McDonalds, willingly or unwillingly, has also popularised a new grammar rule. Their very successful advertising slogan says “i’m lovin’ it.” There – even my Microsoft Word underlines the slogan in red, showing there is something here with which it disagrees. Actually, there are two problems here – can you guess what they are?

One problem is with the punctuation. Usually, first person singular ‘I’ is a capital letter. I know it is more fashionable with some people to use a lower-case ‘i’. Personally I don’t use it and I don’t recommend using it when writing something formal. Maybe McDonalds started using it more than 10 years ago in order to be fashionable with younger people who were also starting to use lower-case ‘i’ in texts and messages to each other. But the other problem is a grammatical problem - about the verb, ‘to love’. Usually, this is a stative verb.

A stative verb is a verb that doesn’t talk about an action or something that you do. Instead, stative verbs talk about a state, or a way of being, maybe something more internal, something inside you, but not an action. Stative verbs talk about emotions, appearances, preferences, mental states, possessions, and measurements. Grammatically, you can’t usually make a stative verb like ‘to love’ into the continuous or progressive by adding ‘to be’ and ‘ing’. For most native speakers, that usually sounds very strange. Some people say it just isn’t correct.

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McDonalds is showing us that grammar rules change and that in this case we can use a stative verb with ‘to be’ and ‘ing’. This doesn’t make it active, like you are really doing it, but perhaps it gives a sense of action to an emotion, or a preference, etc. This makes the internal state more immediate, more ‘now’. Perhaps McDonalds is using old words in new ways to give new meanings. The future is looking good for some stative verbs. Many people say they’re hating something rather than they hate it. Or, they’re thinking or feeling something rather than they think or feel it. McDonalds has certainly made a lot of money from showing that grammar rules can change. I wonder what other companies help change language? Maybe I should google that.