Insult isn’t clever. It’s mean and it’s wrong.

What factors coalesce to create this license to stigmatize fast-food workers?

Almost everyone has heard it, or some version of it. Many of us have said it.

It has become one of our culture’s defining and universally sanctioned judgments, a statement of denigration uttered with unthinking ease: “He (or she or they) couldn’t get a job at McDonald’s.”

This is how we — everyday people in conversation, critics and political pundits, academics wrapped in a sense of egalitarianism — describe those whom we deem particularly lacking in competence. It is the equal opportunity epithet that comes as naturally to those who lean left as to those who bend right.

Often (although not always), the objects of our judgment — those who “couldn’t even work” at fastfood venues — are people who hold prestigious jobs for which they show little ability. We use the phrase to brand and belittle these alleged incompetents, but, in the process, we also blithely demean and malign an entire group of low-wage employees: People laboring to support their families. Students working their way through school. Individuals who, for one justifiable reason or another, find that this is where they have landed for now and maybe later.

Over the years I’ve frequently asked myself: Why this particular group of employees? What factors coalesce to create this license to stigmatize fast-food workers? Other lowwage employment groups, after all, have similar demographic profiles.

Do we unconsciously associate the mental capacity of fast-food employees with the empty calories that nutritionists claim is dispensed at these restaurants? Or is it the quickness of the service — which the public has come to demand — that implies a lack of intellectual heft? Because, let’s face it, degrading the employees of upscale eating establishments where waits are long (and work most likely not as grueling) has not yet made it into our culture’s lexicon of insult.

I do know this — I don’t have the ability to do fast-food work and, in fact, know few people who do. These are quick-paced positions that require a constellation of competencies, each one as important as the next: teamwork, high energy, immediate responsiveness, good listening comprehension, composure under stress, arithmetic confidence, and, in the face of demanding customers, patience, self-control, good humor, and a gracious demeanor. (And this list doesn’t even include the resilience needed to press on when your very livelihood is a punchline for ineptitude.)

Think of all the jobs, many of which pay better, with requirements that don’t even come near to this set of requisite skills.

We have received food from these hands. We have exchanged pleasantries with these people. Do we really want to participate in what has become a regular, often public, ritual of disparagement?

Time to retire “couldn’t even work at . . .”