A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs...
Why? Because illiterate council officials are confused by them? Good guess, but no...
...to avoid problems with computer systems.
Then write better programs! Who are they written for, the machines, or us?
North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases. The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past.
And it's not gone down well, I'm happy to say:
Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe – such as the nearby St Mary’s Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it – infuriated her.
I'm with you, Sam! Lucky they didn't ask a grocer, though...
Though the updated St Mary’s sign had no apostrophe, someone had graffitied an apostrophe back on to the sign with a marker pen, which the former teacher said was “brilliant”.
There's a business opportunity for someone!
North Yorkshire council said it was not the first to opt to “eliminate” the apostrophe from street signs. Cambridge city council had done the same, before it bowed to pressure and reinstated the apostrophe after complaints from campaigners.
So you didn't learn from their experience? What happened to Yorkshire's traditional hard-headed common sense?
A spokesperson from North Yorkshire council added: “All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666.
“This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (eg apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems.”
Are people in Cambridgeshire wandering around lost as a result of putting them back in? No? There's no issue then!
Not sure it’s a business opportunity - at least as long as there are people out there like my late grandmother-in-law, who always carried a selection of marker pens in her handbag for this very purpose.
ReplyDeleteYou may well have unwittingly seen her handiwork; she was an assiduous corrector of errors in municipal, hospital and transport
notices all over South Essex for several decades.
nice try, but unfortunately for the council, that excuse doesn't wash - the apostrophe has no special meaning in a text search of a database. Another example of trying to 'blind them with science' when the peole trying it on don't fully understand the science themselves.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if King's Lynn or Westward Ho! will take this up?
ReplyDeleteI call bullshit. If the computers can manage town names that include punctuation then they can manage street names with punctuation.
My suspicion is it is nothing to do with computers, more to do with the lack of grammar capabilities of the staff employed.
That will cause a problem in York, Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate amongst others.
ReplyDeleteSome Councils must be overstaffed, thinking of things to make their jobs relevant and ways to spend council tax revenues.
"Dearnotyhyorkshirecounciliwishtoregistermydisagreementatyourlackofgrammarinetevtingsyreetnamesandsignsasyouknowgrammarisveryimportantintheenglishlanguageaditteachestheyoungtherelevanceoflanguagegrammarandabilitiesofunderstandinghowthepeopleofthiscountrycametoformwhatisconsideredtobeaninternationallanguagespokenbyalmosteverycountryintheworldjustthinkhowdillywewouldlookifwrgollowrfyourexampleandcompletelyeradicatedallformsofpuncuationwrwouldbethelaughingstockoftheplanetjustadyouarethelaughingstockofthecountryidohopeyouchangeyourmindalsopleaseexcuseanyspellingmistakesadnoonereallyappreciatesasmartarseyourssincerelypenseivat"
ReplyDeleteSorted
Penseivat
Even if punctuation has specific meanings in computer languages, well, the *data entry* blocks should be built to not do that. You shouldn't be able to execute commands through filling out the place name blocks.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for searches, any search worth the programmer's pay would be set to ignore spaces and punctuation anyway. 'st mary's' would come up along with 'sant mary's' or 'stmarys' in a search. Problem solved.
Up next: banning decimal numbers and forcing everyone to use base 16, to be consistent with computers' internal representation.
ReplyDeleteThe reference to BS 7666:2006 is definitely a smokescreen on the part of the North Yorkshire Council’s spokesperson. BS 7666 advises that compilers of street gazetteers should not include punctuation marks UNLESS they appear in the street name. It gives as an example “Dr Newton’s Way”.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that BS in North Yorkshire stands for Bull Shit.
"...as long as there are people out there like my late grandmother-in-law, who always carried a selection of marker pens in her handbag for this very purpose."
ReplyDeleteMore power to her!
"...unfortunately for the council, that excuse doesn't wash - the apostrophe has no special meaning in a text search of a database."
Yes, it appears no 'journalist' bothered to investigate if the council was being economical with the truth, as usual.
"My suspicion is it is nothing to do with computers, more to do with the lack of grammar capabilities of the staff employed."
They'd certainly find it challenging.
"Sorted"
😂
"...any search worth the programmer's pay ..."
Aha, there's the likely culprit, as the Post Office found out.
"Up next: banning decimal numbers and forcing everyone to use base 16, to be consistent with computers' internal representation."
Please don't give them ideas!
"The reference to BS 7666:2006 is definitely a smokescreen..."
Yup, but don't expect the journalists to point that out.