Tuesday is now the suckiest day of the week.

Have you heard? Tuesday is now the suckiest day of the week.

Or so said fast-food giant McDonald's, in an ad campaign promoting its new Premium Roast coffee. The promo is airing in the Chicago market (and possibly elsewhere - chime in if you've seen it). At least, it was.

The ad featured a tight overhead shot of a glistening, milky-brown cup of the new java, telling viewers that they can pop in to McDonald's every Monday and get a free cup of the new brew - thus making Tuesday, according to the commercial, "the suckiest day of the week," because on Tuesday the coffee at McDonald's isn't free.

However, within the last day or two, the language in the ad has changed. Did they do a poll and discover the public disapproved?

Tuesday is now the "crummiest" day of the week. For some inexplicable reason, the language in the ad was changed - but who's fooling who? We know that crummiest is just a stand in for suckiest.

Did they uncover evidence that Tuesday really wasn't the suckiest day of the week?

And what of the other days of the week? McDonald's is charging you for coffee on Thursday or Saturday; shouldn't they be sucky (or crummy), too?

For kicks, I ran a search on the Nexis news databases looking for any mention of (or explanation for) the change. I came up empty.

Undaunted, I tried again, using the word "suckiest" as my keyword, I found 48 occurences of the word McDonald's used to describe Tuesday.

The earliest indexed story using the word "suckiest" was in the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Virginia on March 30, 1997. Larry Bonko (yes, that's a real name) was writing about the goings on at "Late Night with Conan O'Brien":

At this taping, the audience was young and enthusiastic - many college kids in Manhattan on Spring Break. The warm-up guy played a little game of determining America's ''10 suckiest colleges.'' The undergrads loved it.

More recently, suckiest appeared in a March 6, 2006 USA Today article about the AT&T/BellSouth merger. Author Kevin Haney tells us:

[BellSouth CEO Duane Ackerman} certainly convinced me that BellSouth -- and the local phone industry in general -- was about the suckiest business going.

You should also know that Nexis returned 645 hits for a search on "crummiest". One could infer that crummiest has more influence than suckiest in the land of McDonald's.

When will they learn that it doesn't matter how you frame it when your coffee sucks?