A Minor Irritation.

There are some new advertising posters all around the scruffy, near-defunct shopping precinct in Uttoxeter. They’re for KP Nuts, one of the leading brands of packaged nuts in the UK, and the catch line reads: 

There’s nuts, then there’s KP nuts

Now, any native English speaker – and even those blessèd people over the water who have learned English to a reasonable level – know that ‘there’s’ is an abbreviation of ‘there is’, and they also know that the conjugation of the verb ‘to be’ has ‘is’ when relating to a singular object, and ‘are’ when the object is plural. And so this catch line should read ‘There are nuts, etc.’

So why has the writer made this glaring error? Would he or she have written, for example, ‘there is thirty children in the classroom’? Was the erroneous verb a product of ignorance, or was it deliberately engineered for some arcane reason known only to advertising copy writers? You might argue that if writers can take refuge in the principle of poetic licence, isn’t it right to allow advertisers the same indulgence? I’m not convinced.

I thought about it for a good five minutes as I was walking to Tesco, and eventually asked myself: ‘Does it matter?’ Well, yes and no. It all depends on where I’m currently standing on the question of the meaning and purpose of life. It keeps changing, you see.