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!
