A few weeks ago I posted on the Spacing Toronto blog about the new Toronto street signs my city is installing (I’ll happily admit I prefer what Montreal has done to update its street signs). Much like Montreal, each of the inner and outer suburbs of Toronto have their own distinctive signs, so Toronto has moved to consolidate the look in a consistent design. The post prompted a good debate amongst our readers about the pros-and-cons of the new design. I’m sure Montrealers have a lot of opinions on whether to take similar action as Hogtown.
But another kind of street sign debate is raging across the Atlantic. In Birmingham, England, city council has made the final decision to drop apostrophes from their street signs. Goodbye Queen’s Park, hello Queens Park.
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.”
…
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.
photo by Rachel Canon
6 comments
It’s unbelievable that anyone can drop apostrophies. they are required for our understanding of English.
If we start dropping them from one part of usage then we get confused, need to think more and are unsure when we have to write.
If we’re going down this route, I would suggest dropping St,Ste,saint because it’s a pain knowing what to enter into the sat nav/gps system.
As for Birmingham, I’ve just to roll my eyes.
Ahhh and then at the end we hear the truth. This is all to appease our computer overlords. Got it.
I think this is ridiculous. The arguments they are using are pretty lame. On google maps, you type in any one of a number of variations on “Sainte-Catherine St.”, for example, and the program can figure out quite easily what street you are looking for.
The funniest argument, though, are these two;
“Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed,” he said.
I suppose that’s true in a sense (Queen’s Park no longer belongs to the Queen). However, think for a moment about the grammatical implication of St. Pauls street.
“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.”
How anyone can argue that finding “St. Pauls Street” is simple, while finding “St. Paul’s Street” somehow requires a higher level of formal education is laughable.
No apostrophes in Montreal. Way too Anglo.
I wonder whether the corrupted version would be acceptable, since it dosen’t technically qualify as English?
I think there are no laws against the use of English in Quebec. I think they are against the use of any language other than French. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t know much about Quebec laws, just what I hear.
Je sens un peu de colère dans le message de Alanah.