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Who's your Mac Daddy?

According to voting at the Urban Dictionary, it's not Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, inventors of the Macintosh.
Written by David Morgenstern, Contributor

I happened the other day to be watching a very early episode of The Big Bang Theory and heard Sheldon say: "I don't know your odds in the world as a whole, but as far as the population of this car goes, you're a veritable Mac Daddy."

Mac Daddy? Is that anything to do with Apple Macintosh? It didn't sound right.

Since this reference was outside my Mac patois, I checked the Urban Dictionary. It appears that Mac Daddy means "top pimp."

"Mac Daddy" or Mack Daddy is a term used to describe a man with an unusual power over women, and is derived from the French and later Louisiana Creole patois term "maqereau," which means "pimp." Adding "daddy" makes it mean "top pimp."

The '70s black-exploitation movie The Mack, a dramatization of the life of a street pimp, furthered the popularity of the term in urban America. This use of "mac" is quite different from the Scottish/Gaelic term "mac" (son of) used to address an unknown man.

"Freddy got five chicks on the south side alone ... he da mac daddy!"

The second meaning has more of the pimp about it.

The pimp-meister, the king of the streetwalkers, possessor of the blingest of bling-bling. The mac daddy is the man who means everything (and the only man who really means anything) to his ladies of the night.

"Oh baby--you ma mac daddy!"

Sadly, the Macintosh connection was voted down, though now that I really consider it, perhaps wisely. "They are the original mac daddies because they invented the mac."

Nooooo! Even I as a Mac-phile can't abide this meaning.

I recall a very popular Mac-only store located in the South of Market area in San Francisco back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Its name was Macadam, a 200-year-old term for a type of concrete road construction. The owner of the store didn't want to have any problem with Apple over the name and this historic moniker was solid. This was in the time before Apple squeezed out the independent Apple Specialist stores with the advance of the Apple Store retail initiative.

There can be issues from several corners with Mac-flavored brands. For example, a Mission Street sushi bar ages ago named itself MacSushi, which outside of Japan shouldn't be much of a problem, one might think. But McDonald's forced it to change its name and the bar became We Be Sushi instead.

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