Pedants to protest over City Ground renaming

With Nottingham Forest reported to be on the verge of announcing a major sponsorship deal with the Kuwaiti government, a small group is planning a protest over the renaming of the club’s historic City Ground home.

“We don’t mind the club selling the naming rights,” says Arty Culation of pressure group Pedants Preferring Perfection. “In the modern age, stadium-sponsorship is nothing new and all clubs must move with the times.

“What really bothers us about re-branding the City Ground as ‘Kuwait City Ground Stadium’ is the appalling tautology.

“The phrase ‘City Ground’ already has a perfectly good word denoting that it refers to a location in which sporting events are held. Why do we need this extra, totally redundant word ‘stadium’ bolting onto the end?

“You might as well call it the ‘Kuwait City Ground Stadium Arena Venue Amphitheatre’ and be done with it. By the way, if you are going to quote me on that, makes sure you spell ‘amphitheatre’ with ‘r-e’ at the end, and it’s ‘amphi’, not ‘ampi’ as many ignorant people seem to say.

This reporter asked Mr Culation whether his group were planning to picket the club to get their point across.

“No, we won’t be picketing because that term generally refers to industrial disputes, but we will be staging a demonstration with some carefully punctuated placards. I’ve even approved a few witty slogans, such as ‘Tautology is bad and not very good.’ We chuckled about that one for several minutes. Four, to be precise.”

I asked Mr Culation if he thought his campaign might result in less language mistakes being made in football writing in general. He told me that I should have said “fewer language mistakes” and that the “in general” part of my sentence was superfluous having already been implied by the context.

Our interview ended abruptly when he was forwarded a tweet by a BBC journalist reporting that Forest were to receive “half a billion pounds” for the sponsorship deal.

“Preposterous!” he fumed, before storming off to tear up his TV licence. “Unless they are referring to the figure £500,000,000,000, it isn’t half a billion. £500,000,000 is actually a 2000th of a billion, unless the sponsorship also involves a move to America, in which case the figure should be in dollars, though thinking about it, the club should really move to Kuwait itself to prevent people mistakenly thinking the ‘Kuwait City Ground’ is in Kuwait City as the name so confusingly suggests…”