mc
Explanation
In this comic, a customer at a drive-through window asks: "Hi, could I get a six-piece chicken McNugget?" The drive-through employee responds: "Do you mean chicken AT nugget? What makes it a McNugget?"
In the second panel, a person says: "You ever wonder what the word would be if the Anglo-Normans had conquered a chicken-eating civilization instead?" Another person, looking stunned, simply responds: "DIAGRAM."
The joke is about the linguistic phenomenon known as the "Mc" or "Mac" prefix and, more broadly, about the Anglo-Norman influence on the English language. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English absorbed a massive number of French and Latin-derived words. One well-known result is that English often has different words for animals and their meat: "cow" (Germanic/Anglo-Saxon) vs. "beef" (French/Norman), "pig" vs. "pork," "sheep" vs. "mutton." This happened because the Anglo-Saxon farmers raised the animals while the Norman French aristocrats ate them.
The comic playfully extends this idea to McDonald's branding. "McNugget" uses the Scottish/Irish "Mc" prefix (meaning "son of"), but the employee's question -- "what makes it a McNugget?" -- prompts a thought experiment about how language would be different if the Anglo-Normans had conquered a different civilization. The person demanding a "DIAGRAM" to understand this is overwhelmed by the linguistic complexity.
The joke plays on the inherent absurdity of English linguistic history and how arbitrary the language's development has been, filtered through the lens of fast-food branding.