PalenQ

Ubiquitously Europeans call McDonalds "MacDonalds" and I wonder why - why not "Mick Donalds" like it is supposed to be - Europeans on this forum how do you pronounce McDonalds?

Thanks for any insights!

Gretchen

Ummmm MacDonald's. Sounds just fine to me.

PalenQ

Some French friends call it "MacDo" - long o - like in dough.

annhig

quiet day where you are, Pal?

PalenQ

Yeh - Friday before holiday weekend - Labor Day and about 90 degrees - what do folks in Cornwall and Britain call McDonalds - some Americans say "the Golden Arches".

hetismij2

MacDonalds sounds ok. Mick is wrong. Mc is just that. M sound, hard c sound said together.
McDo also makes sense if you are not a native English speaker.
The name Donald is pronounced Do(ugh)-nald in many European countries.

hetismij2

I call it free WiFi. No other reason to visit it.
My DIL ang grandkids call it MacDonalds.

MyriamC

In Belgium we usually call it McDo (with a long o). But I prefer Quick. ;-)

PalenQ

Some folks here (U s A) call it 'Mickey D's'

PalenQ

I too like Quick - in France - for long time and maybe still their saying was "the hamburger that beats the Americans' or something like that - it is a Belgian company I do believe?

Come to think of it the lack of any real pan-European fast food burger chain besides Quick and Burger King is perplexing - or are there any others - Wendy's once made a try but I think re-trenched.

Burghy's dominated the Italian fast food hamburger market but was bought up by MacDo.

The Dutch FEBO for some reason never expanded across borders and has few seats so is really a take out.

In fact most of the fast food chains seems to be American - Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken (which is really huge in Asia of all places!) I hear.

xyz123

They call it a lot of other things too. Things that can't be repeated in a family publication.

menachem

We call it "the scottish restaurant"

annhig

MAC Donalds is what we call it, when we call it anything at all.

there's one on the road out of Cornwall, which locals call 'Hamburger Hill".

clausar

In Greece we simply call it : Μακ Ντόναλτς ......

vjpblovesitaly

Is it spelled McDonald's on the signs? It annoys me also when people here type MacDonald's

bilboburgler

it just depresses me when someone calls it a restaurant

flanneruk

"Come to think of it the lack of any real pan-European fast food burger chain besides Quick and Burger King is perplexing"

Quick operates scarcely anywhere outside Belgium and France: Burger King spent most of its life as part of the British Grand Met, or the Anglo-Irish Guinness/Diageo, conglomerate.

There's practically no kind of retailing, apart from petrol stations, which operates as a "pan-European" business.

That's because Europe's a continent, not a country. We're 50 different cultures (or more if you believe Scotland or Catalonia or Bavaria are really separate nations) - and our retailing reflects this. Only terrorist-supporting Yank morons like PalQ fail to understand the fundamentals of Europe.

xyz123

Many moons ago, I took a tour, one of those if it's Tuesday it must be Belgium type tours (which wasn't the horror some make them out to be but that's for another time and place and it was indeed many moons ago). Anyway, on this tour we had an Austrian guide, a native of Vienna and throughout the tour he was very condescending about people who visited Europe and ate at Mickey D. Of course they were all over the place in what was then West Germany (no doubt the influence of the US Army)...so we headed for Vienna and he is describing the wonderful cuisine of the Austrian capital. And he made a special point of saying yo won't find McDonald's there.

In any event, we headed for the Ringstrasse that goes around some of te main attractions of Vienna. And there I spotted the golden arches and said to him, "What is that I see there?" He looked out and said, "Oh my goodness, that wasn't there three months ago!"

Unfortunately, Mickey D is one of the closest things there is to a universal European experience, almost always jammed with locals. (Just check out the McDonald's in places like Krakow and Leningrad...oops St. Petersburg which I have visited. That and coca cola.

Or my dear friend Flanneruk, do you still get your hamburgers at Wimpy's?

luademochila

I'm neither european, nor an english speaker, but I'm a latin language speaker.

How do you spell an acronym ? That's how some latin language speakers like portuguese speakers read only two consonants together. MC sounds like M.C. You need a vowel between them to make it look like a word.

Could also be due the same reason that so many travellers from USA spell "Rothenberg ob der Tauber", "Nuremburg" or "Salzberg".

annhig

Or my dear friend Flanneruk, do you still get your hamburgers at Wimpy's?>>

i bet flanner gets his at Waitrose and cooks them himself.