McD's "I'd Hit It" (was Re: Nobody Does It Like Sara Lee?)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:25:00 -0400, Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:

>But has anyone but
>me and Aaron McGruder noticed the asininity of Mickey D's current
>urban-audience slogan, "I'd hit that [ass]"? In current BE, this phrase
>means, "There goes a woman with whom I'd like to have sex" (in my
>youth, we said "I'd tap that [ass]") and leaving out the word "ass"
>changes the meaning not a whit. It merely turns the phrase into a
>pseudo-euphemism.

It was widely ridiculed in the blogosphere when the banner ads first
appeared.  Try Googling for <mcdonalds "hit it">.  The first blogger to
draw attention to it may have been Andrew Teman in a post from Jan. 26,
which also mentions the slightly less ludicrous BE appropriation,
"Wal-Mart has everything I need. No diggity."
<http://andrewteman.org/blog/index.php?p=39>

I'm pretty sure McDonald's pulled the banner ad soon after it became an
object of ridicule, so it lives on only in blog archives and in
_Boondocks_ (McGruder's satire is a bit belated, but that's not surprising
given the delay of many weeks that comic strip artists usually work
under).


--Ben Zimmer