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[johnslat]

Mother of God - is this the end of the apostrophe?

Its a catastrophe for the apostrophe in Britain

By MEERA SELVA, Associated Press Writer
1 hr 57 mins ago
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.

[nstick13]

Nooooooo!

Just a step in downgrading the intelligence of society, IMO.

[Never Ceased To Be Amazed]

OMG!, an advocation of the "apostrophe deletion rule"? NEVER, never, never!

BTW, I recently questioned this on a UAE thread and was quickly brought to task. However, reading the article, I can now see where it came from.

NCTBA

[Justin Trullinger]

ihavedecidedtoabolishallpunctuationforclarityjustin

[Justin Trullinger]

ihavedecidedtoabolishallpunctuationforclarityjustin

[Never Ceased To Be Amazed]

[hollysuel]

[jonniboy]

This is the same council that decided that Christmas should be called Winterval http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/210672.stm

Anyway who cares? People from there speak funny - as 80% of them acknowledge http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2467053/Birmingham-wishes-it-could-ditch-Brummie-accent.html and most people think it's a place in Alabama.

[Madame J]

Oh I like the Black Country accent! It's so sardonic and down to earth.

As for Winterval, it's hardly any more ridiculous than the PC-mad US habit of saying, "Happy holidays", is it? Except that the latter is laced with irony, seeing as Americans barely get any.

"Most" people think it's a place in Alabama?

[MO39]

[quote="Madame J

As for Winterval, it's hardly any more ridiculous than the PC-mad US habit of saying, "Happy holidays", is it? Except that the latter is laced with irony, seeing as Americans barely get any.

[/quote]

While I agree that "happy holidays" is a bit flat as a greeting, in spite of its alliteration, being Jewish, it's quite a relief not to be greeted with "Merry Christmas" all through the holiday season. After a while I got tired of telling people that I was Jewish and didn't celebrate Christmas and just let it go.. Being an irony-deficient American, I don't get that bit about "H.Hs" being laced with irony .

[Stephen Jones]

[MO39]

[johnslat]

Well, there do seem to be at least two interpretations of the Christmas/Winterval dustup.

"The winterval deniers are at it again.
Ten years after Birmingham City Council invited ridicule by airbrushing out the word Christmas from its official celebrations, there are still some people eager to blame everyone other than local authority leaders at the time for bad publicity arising from the winterval fiasco.
Memories were reawoken this week when the council announced it had invested in a new set of Christmas lights, with a distinctive Christian theme.
Angels and stars will twinkle on city centre streets this year.
To underline the point, a press release detailing the decision included supportive comments from Canon Stewart Jones, Rector of Birmingham and spokesman for Believing in Birmingham - a network of church communities in the city.
This, quite naturally, invited comparisons with events of 1998.
Some bloggers are adamant that the council back then was the victim of a London-led media conspiracy designed to do down Birmingham.
One correspondent suggested a combination of lazy journalists and publicity-hungry bishops was to blame.
Let's look at the facts.
It is true that the city council never admitted it had rebranded Christmas in order to avoid offending non-Christians.
On the other hand, the council failed at the time and has done ever since to explain why it did what it did.
The best explanation was that winterval represented a collective name for the events held from mid-November through to the first week in January.
To most of us, that's Christmas.
Bizarrely, the council stated it didn't want to risk bad luck by keeping Christmas lights up beyond 12th night.
The timing is also significant. The winterval fiasco, in 1998, came to be seen as one of the last, fatal, mistakes of Theresa Stewart's period as the left-wing Labour leader of the city council. She was overthrown by Albert Bore, on a modernising ticket, the following year.
I'm not saying winterval did for Theresa, but it was symptomatic of Birmingham's general loss of direction at the time.
The fact remains that winterval was regarded as a ridiculous attempt to avoid mentioning Christmas in case ethnic minorities might take offence, and is still seen in that way by many prominent people. The last thing Birmingham needed was a reason for the city to be branded as a memebr of the loony left-wing council club. Winterval provided just that reason.
In May 2007 this newspaper reported Aaron Reid, executive director of Birmingham Professional DiverCity, regretting the invention of the name winterval in case Christmas "offends people".
It was "political correctness gone mad", he added.
In December 2007, the Archbishop of Wales denounced winterval as "atheistic fundamentalism".
Most pointedly, John Sentamu said he believed the purpose of winterval was to "systematically erode Christianity from public view".
The lesson from winterval is that perceptions do matter.
The council could in 1998 have killed the controversy stone dead by abandoning such a meaningless title.
It did not do so, and is still living with the loss of reputation today."

http://blogs.birminghampost.net/news/2008/10/why-winterval-fiasco-continues.html

Maybe it should be Christmas for the Christians, Winterval for the politically correct, and Festivus for the rest of us.

Regards,
John

[killian]

back on topic: apostrophes. they have many applications.

for contractions such as "I'd" and "we've" they are necessary yet.

but for geographical stuff such as "New Halls Ferry" or "New Hall's Ferry" they are irrelevant.

[fluffyhamster]

The easiest way for Birmingham Council to avoid debates over reintroducing apostophes would have been to not remove them from public signs in the first place, and Cllr Mullaney's arguments are clearly without the slightest merit.

I wonder if in centuries to come, those Brummies who've never ever met an apostrophe will ask 'Which Kings or Queens - how many?' (not that, in an abstract sense, they'd be entirely wrong to pose the question and think of the answer in those terms, even though the plural would still need the apostrophe to show possession. Oh, what lack of thought-processes, to never ponder the "communicative gaps" alurking!).