(no subject)

[teddywolf]

With apologies to Steven Colbert regarding the style...

Today, watching an episode of The Daily Show on my TiVo - great to fast forward through those commercials, a real time-saver - I caught a fraction of a second of a McDonald's commercial. Now I'm not one of the "McDonald's fans", I don't care if he really had a farm or not, but what got my dandruff up - hey, it's only dander if its from your pet cat who sheds all the time - what got my dandruff up was this:

"many drive thru's open 24 hours"

I'm not a major grammar cop. I never got 100% based on my punctuation and my capitals. Even so, they really chapped my hide on this one. OK, maybe the fact that they didn't spell "through" with an '-ough' at the end is frustrating, but the most annoying part for me in that sentence - a sentence without a proper beginning, verb or end, which makes it more of a dangling phrase - is the apostrophe in "thru's". The only two ways to parse it mean either they believe that 'is' is the pluralized form of itself, which it isn't, or 'aren't' if you mistakenly believe 'is' doesn't exist, or that McDonald's, which has over thirty thousand locations selling a variety of high fructose corn syrup-laden food and beverage offerings, only has a single drive through window. As the latter would be invalidated by simply noting the word 'many', I believe they meant the former, which suggests that McDonald's has finally outsourced their English proofreading to illiterate Mongolians in China or to a kindergartener in Butte, Montana in an effort to save money.

I don't have any beef with McDonald's. No, really, I don't buy their burgers, I think they taste awful. But I still flip past their commercials on a regular basis and occasionally flip their retail establishments something when I pass them. So I plead with you, McDonald's: you are a giant multinational corporation making billions of dollars in revenue from franchise fees and from leasing commercial land which you own to franchise owners, who you only mostly own. With all that money, I'm sure you could spare a few dollars to have somebody proofread your commercials to keep your grammar straight. It's not easy for you to genuinely sound illiterate, because you have too much money and spend a lot to make sure your annual corporate report has no mistakes. So please, McDonald's, think of the children. Teach them to write a sentence the right way. Really, it doesn't take any more effort than flipping one of your burgers.

Comments

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Heh. That last sentence made me think of the scene in Fast Food Nation when the kid drops the burger on the floor, picks it up, dusts it off, and puts it back on the griddle.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

I still need to see that movie...

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Ugh, no you don't. I was vegetarian for weeks after I saw it.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Oh, I already have some idea of what they do at fast food. I haven't been put off my feed.

[dpolicar]

"open" is a perfectly good transitive verb, thank you very much! Clearly we're being informed that, should you find yourself with an hour you need opened, many drive-throughs are able to help!

[magid.livejournal.com]

I think they only open batches of 24 hours at a time. Perhaps they're packaged in large, Costco-style multi-packs?

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

This would explain the large number of drive-throughs extant.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

I can open my hour many ways that are far better, IMNSHO.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

I don't have any beef with McDonald's.

hah!!!

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Sometimes potatoes, but as I'm a beef and potatoes guy I don't eat there much :P