The pedants are revolting! News of Birmingham’s banning of apostrophes from street signs has been widely reported in the international media, with many commentators clearly shocked that a British city is taking such liberties with the Queen’s English.
Councillors in Birmingham have defended the decision, stating that too much council time is spent debating the correct placing of apostrophes in the city’s street signs. For example, should it be King’s Heath, Kings’ Heath or Kings Heath. The council has also argued that search engines and GPS navigation devices will be confused by mis-spellings. So Birmingham has decided to give up by removing all apostrophes, seeing this as a way to remove confusion.
With retailers such as Barclays, Boots and even Harrods already ditching their apostrophes, while companies such as Tesco insist on offering us “chart CD’s”, it’s no wonder people are confused about the correct grammatical rules.
No thank's. I'll go to Currys.
Where I take issue most with Birmingham City Council’s decision is their apparent belief that omitting apostrophes counts as an abstention in the apostrophe debate. However, to an already confused general public, the removal of appropriate apostrophes from street signs just further muddies the waters, and will lead to more offerings like this:
I may sound like a grammar Nazi, but I’m actually quite forgiving of aberrant apostrophe use in personal communication. I’m sure that I make my own fair share of howlers as well. There is no excuse, however, for such mistakes in the signs erected by retailers and public bodies. Just on my daily commute to work today I drove past a beauty salon unfortunately named “Victoria Nail’s and Spa”. How such an error can make it all the way to a storefront with no-one pointing out the error I honestly cannot understand. Perhaps they could do us pedants a favour and donate their apostrophe to a nearby Shoppers Drug Mart.
As for the argument that modern search engines will be foxed by apostrophe usage, how many people using GPS devices search by road name? Postal code is a far more convenient and unambiguous way to search. Even if you don’t have the postal code and try to enter the street name, it will autocomplete after the first few letters. As for search engines, in my experience Google is intelligent enough to take account of such variations.
In most cases, there should surely be no ambiguity anyhow. In the above example, given that the square is unlikely to have been named after more than one St Paul, there should surely be no confusion (unless it is as to whether the sign is actually a proclamation regarding St Paul’s lack of trendiness, but that’s another story entirely). As such, if there were any problems with modern technology not understanding differences in punctuation, I would imagine that I along with many others would be victims of the Council’s new directive, expecting there to be an apostrophe where one is not to be found. Remember that only Birmingham (and now Wakefield, I understand) have so far taken this step.
Birmingham City Council are hardly innovators in the abolition of apostrophes, however. The US Board on Geographic Names removed all apostrophes from American place names the 1890s with only a handful of exceptions, such as Martha’s Vineyard. Canada took a similar step in the same decade.
There are some lessons, however, from the Canadian experience. When Hudson’s Bay had its apostrophe removed, for example, it became Hudson Bay, not Hudsons Bay. This is more understandable. The Bay is named after Henry Hudson, and it was deemed that there is no logic in retaining the final ’s’ after the apostrophe was removed. Similarly, the street sign St Pauls Square makes no sense without an apostrophe. Either remove the ’s’ or put back the apostrophe. The story does not end there for the Canadian apostrophe, however. In the 1970s, the ‘ban’ on apostrophes was lifted for places where the apostrophe was still in regular usage in spite of over 70 years of prohibition. As such, places such as St John’s in Newfoundland and Lion’s Head in Ontario officially reverted back to a spelling which had never been abandoned by most people.
In the US, however, there has be no such rethink, much to the chagrin of those who are fed up with falling standards of grammar and spelling in the country. Last year, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, referring to themselves as TEAL (the Typo Eradication Advancement League), set off with a bag of magic markers and correction fluid on a grammatical odyssey across America, correcting erroneous punctuation and spelling as they went. They would normally alert sign owners of the errors of their ways, offering to correct the signs for them, but sometimes just made the amendments anyway.
Jeff Deck at work
They ran into trouble in the Grand Canyon National Park, where they couldn’t resist correcting a 70 year old sign inside the Desert View Watchtower on the South Rim which, unknown to them, was considered “a unique historical object of irreplaceable value”. They had posted all records of corrections they had made on their blog, giving the authorities all the evidence they needed to prosecute them, resulting in a hefty fine and a ban from US National Parks for a year. Their blog is now no more than an apology for their act of defacement. Let this be a warning to anyone heading to Birmingham with a permanent marker at the ready.
This issue may be considered a big fuss about nothing to many. As has been pointed out, the Council had already removed many of the apostrophes from the signs in Birmingham before this furore, and only made this declaration to silence the protesting pedants once and for all. Meanwhile, the man in the apostrophe-stripped street was oblivious to the changes. But this ignorance is no argument to justify the apostrophe cull. Where would it all end. Given the most common forms of written communication in our modern age, how long would it be, as one commentator has quipped, before Birmingham’s Great Charles Street becomes GR8 Chas St? First they came for the apostrophes…
Who says pedants don't have a sense of humour?
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