Keep the Big Mac on track

It’s well known that McDonald’s’ adverts suck out our souls and have been sources of annoyance and social immobility thanks to the propaganda and vague statements found therein. One can easily rebuff claims such as the enthusiastic “freshly prepared” with ‘We’re going to have to reassess the meaning of those two words if what you say is to be true.’ This is largely thanks to the advertising campaigns of McDonald’s making sense.

No matter what you can say about how many children they have ground to make their “100 per cent freshly ground Arabica beans”, or how global warming has risen by one-third in the past five years thanks to their “Filet-o-Fish” (sic), the quality of grammar and syntax in their advertising has been impeccable, despite the company originating in the USA. Until now.

The issue, friends, is a three-word mantra given by the unctuous voiceover at the end of their latest adverts. My problem is with the expression “and then some”. According to urbandictionary.com this term is “used to humorously imply that the preceding statement was an understatement”. Given that the preceding statement here is “That’s McDonald’s”, (which on its own would obviously make sense) saying “and then some” makes absolutely no sense. The expression is used correctly in the following short conversation between two people:

Person A: Wow, this article is really good!
Person B: And then some!

So Person A makes the first claim (note how “That’s McDonald’s” isn’t actually a claim, unless they are genuinely unsure of this), saying that this article is really good. Person B then indicates that he thinks the article isn’t just really good, but really, really good. So when the voiceover says “That’s McDonald’s”, and then replies to himself (narcissistic bastard that he is) “and then some”, he’s talking rubbish, which, given the rest of the advert, at least makes him consistent.

He is saying that, in his opinion, McDonald’s is even more McDonald’s than it depicted itself in the advert (albeit a biased representation). Maybe he is using “McDonald’s” as an adjective. The speculation is endless. One could almost feel sorry for him, as he seems so pleased with himself when he excitedly adds this witty remark at the end of his speech. Perhaps he adlibbed that bit. It would be hard to break it to him that what he is saying just doesn’t make much sense.

Is this going to lead to an excessive use of the term “and then some”? Do McDonald’s want this previously harmless expression to go viral, as with Budweiser’s “Wassup” phenomenon? No satisfactory explanations are given as to what this poor confused soul is trying to tell us, which just shows how reading the Boar gives its readers cutting-edge, informed insight. And then some.