Birmingham drops the apostrophe

Firecat

Firecat

Politically Charged
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090131/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_no_apostrophe

Apparently they "confuse people"

LONDON ? On the streets of Birmingham, the queen's English is now the queens English.
England's second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they're confusing and old-fashioned.
But some purists are downright possessive about the punctuation mark.
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."
But grammarians say apostrophes enrich the English language.
"They are such sweet-looking things that play a crucial role in the English language," said Marie Clair of the Plain English Society, which campaigns for the use of simple English. "It's always worth taking the effort to understand them, instead of ignoring them."
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.
A test by The Associated Press backed this up. In a search for London street St. Mary's Road, the name popped up before the apostrophe had to be entered.
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."
To sticklers, a missing or misplaced apostrophe can be a major offense.
British grammarians have railed for decades against storekeepers' signs advertising the sale of "apple's and pear's," or pubs offering "chip's and pea's."
In her best-selling book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," Lynne Truss recorded her fury at the title of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy "Two Weeks Notice," insisting it should be "Two Weeks' Notice."
"Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended," she wrote.
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Good to see their government is up to important business as well.
 
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.
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Jesus, you guys start teaching proper grammar really late over there. I was taught about the apostrophe right after I graduated from a grade that had naptime.
 
Hilarious. How to make a worldwide declaration that as a Council you're too stupid to deal with apostrophes and the people who live there are too stupid to navigate around the area because of them.

Future gangs will be roaming the streets with cans of spray paint tagging buildings and putting in apostrophes on signs where they were once removed.
 
Oh for Christ's sake! What the hell is wrong with these people?

We learn the apostrophe pretty early on but as the education system is run on the basis of "prizes for all" half the population are illiterate.

If the tories just had the courage to bring back grammar schools and proper teaching then we might have a chance.
 
So is this Birmingham's way of telling the world that they are stupid?
 
"But you guys only invented the language!" :roll:
 
Nabster said:
Good to see their government is up to important business as well.
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Supposedly this is the reason they have done this, there was too much time wasted at council meetings debating whether a sign needed an apostrophe or not.
 
ashspet said:
Future gangs will be roaming the streets with cans of spray paint tagging buildings and putting in apostrophes on signs where they were once removed.
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I would totally do this if I lived there.
 
I wonder how long I can go without using an apostrophe...
 
Sigh, not more of this...

At this rate the future of Britain will be weird. Everyone will drive around in vehicles that resemble something out of Mad Max and people will drive around aimlessly looking for resources.
 
Its actually very hard to do this. Im going to start after I get off work, just because I literally have to ween myself off of typing with them. I'm finding myself hitting the key and then backspacing a lot.

EDIT: Damn! I almost went the whole post...
 
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