Dumbed Down

So, McDonald's has an adult happy meal. When I first heard this I thought it was a joke, a news bit from The Onion or something. But, the adult happy meals are the real deal. They come with a salad and a water (but what nobody tells you is that if you ask for Coke instead, they'll give it to you.) The meals also come with your own "stepometer" so you can count your steps each day and know whether you've taken enough to work off that Big Mac.

O.K. what was wrong with the previous sentence? If you said the word "stepometer" you are correct. What they are actually called, those little things that count your steps for you, are pedometers. I guess McDonald's thought that the word pedometer was too complicated and instead of taking the opportunity to teach the world a new word, they decided to make up their own word. Adults may be smart enough to know they should eat salads, not burgers.. but there's no way they'll know what pedometer means. The worst part of all this is that it took me a while to realize that the corporate drones had dumbed down their happy meal prize. My co-worker showed me her stepometer and I found myself thinking, "Stepometer? Isn't it called something else? What is it called? Hmm... I guess it is a stepometer." Not only is McDonald's pandering to the small-vocabulary customers, but they're confusing the ones with bigger vocabularies. They are singlehandedly changing the English language with their stupid stepometers.

To top it off, the little contraptions don't work. They count two steps for every one you take. Come to think of it, this could be a ploy to keep Americans fat. Yes, I will admit that I had an adult happy meal last week and the cobb salad was pretty tasty. But now that I've been dumbed down by McDonald's, I won't be having another one.