Kentish Express Ashford & District
Unseasonal campaign gives us ‘inspo’
Wizzard frontman Roy Wood once sang that he wished it could be Christmas every day.
And after his 1973 hit, perhaps his wish has finally come true.
A few weeks ago, while we sat back and enjoyed the balmy temperatures and warm sunshine of July, we received an email from Prominent PR.
It was on behalf of the British Christmas Tree Growers Association, who did a study to show that Ashford is a “hotspot” for those with the surname Christmas.
The study also revealed that Margate is the home for Rudolph, while Tonbridge is the home for the Angels.
The upshot of this fascinating – though ill-timed – information is that the association is promoting its Keep it Real campaign to get us to buy real Christmas trees.
Bizarrely they also want people with festive names to celebrate Christmas in July and share their celebration on the BCTGA Facebook page, with entries to be judged in September this year. Finalists are in with a chance of winning a tree for December – the proper time to celebrate Christmas.
Alarming studies are showing how traditional English spellings and grammar are gradually being lost to American syntax.
Increasingly these Americanisms are creeping into everyday parlance, particularly among youngsters in mobile phone texting and applications.
As a result of this, we see our public relations colleagues in London are very quick on the uptake.
We see normal words like conversation have been abbreviated to “convo”, and such like. But the word that made the Nuts and Bolts desk flinch the other week was in a promotion from Ashford’s County Square shopping centre, which abbreviated the word inspiration to “inspo”.
Rightly, the shopping centre was hoping to attract customers for the summer festival season and doing its bit to boost the town’s Create Festival.
But surely asking people to “follow our instagram for more fashion inspo” is a crime against our great language?