Birmingham bans apostrophes on street signs

[Zastrozzi]

England's second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they're confusing and old-fashioned.

It seems that Birmingham officials have been taking a hammer to grammar for years, quietly dropping apostrophes from street signs since the 1950s. Through the decades, residents have frequently launched spirited campaigns to restore the missing punctuation to signs denoting such places as "St. Pauls Square" or "Acocks Green."

This week, the council made it official, saying it was banning the punctuation mark from signs in a bid to end the dispute once and for all.

Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city's transport scrutiny committee, said he decided to act after yet another interminable debate into whether "Kings Heath," a Birmingham suburb, should be rewritten with an apostrophe.

"I had to make a final decision on this," he said Friday. "We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do."

Mullaney hopes to stop public campaigns to restore the apostrophe that would tell passers-by that "Kings Heath" was once owned by the monarchy.

"Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed," he said. "More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it." ...

Mullaney claimed apostrophes confuse GPS units, including those used by emergency services. But Jenny Hodge, a spokeswoman for satellite navigation equipment manufacturer TomTom, said most users of their systems navigate through Britain's sometime confusing streets by entering a postal code rather than a street address.

She said that if someone preferred to use a street name — with or without an apostrophe — punctuation wouldn't be an issue. By the time the first few letters of the street were entered, a list of matching choices would pop up and the user would choose the destination. ...

There is no national body responsible for regulating place names in Britain. Its main mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, which provides data for emergency services, takes its information from local governments and each one is free to decide how it uses punctuation.

"If councils decide to add or drop an apostrophe to a place name, we just update our data," said Ordnance Survey spokesman Paul Beauchamp. "We've never heard of any confusion arising from their existence." ...

Forget it, Jake. Its Birmingham.

[lagatta]

I hope someone has organised a committee to save the apostrophes.

[Alison]

Suddenly there was a local run on magic markers at Sainsbury's...

[BCseawalker]

Suddenly there was a local run on magic markers at Sainsbury's...

Economic stimulus!

[skdadl]

:

I'd rather see them lose those periods after, eg, St. Abbreviations need periods; contractions don't. Or is it the other way 'round?  

ETA: Is Birmingham really the second largest? I thought that Manchester was. Birmingham is really not all that big.

[Zastrozzi]

Crawford Killian muses in the Tyee that our own illustrious government seems to be dealing with the recession by cutting out wasteful apostrophes:

Today the Conservatives launched a new website, Canada's Economic Action Plan, to show the country that everything is under control.

On one key page, the term "the Harper Government" appears seven times.

The page tells us that Harper saw the recession coming in 2007, and brought in tax cuts to strengthen us against it.

We now have punctuation cuts as well. On that one page, we have "the Harper governments decision" plus six uses of Canada as a possessive minus apostrophes:

Canadas economy

Canadas business conditions

Canadas debt-to-GDP ratio

Canadas financial system

Canadas regulatory environment

Canadas real-estate sector

Other pages on the site (and the site title itself) do use apostrophes, indicating that the Harper Government is keeping its options open. Or cutting costs by firing the Harper Government web editor.

http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/Federal ... 1/ReBrand/

[Catchfire]

Apostrophe, we can get along without you. [/literary joke]

I think we could also get along without the hyphen. Compound words for everyone!

[deBeauxOs]

... Compound words for everyone!

It works for the Swedes and the Germans, does it not?