"What's this? British city stops punctuating street signs!"

Cafe,

The full text of an Associated Press story published in the 1/31/2009
edn. of my local newspaper:


	"What's this? British city stops punctuating street signs!

	"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'
	and '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 yesterday.
	'We keep debating apostrophes in meetings, and we have better
	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 says apostrophes confuse GPS units, including those
	used by emergency services. But Jenny Hodge, a spokeswoman for
	satellite navigation equipment maker TomTom, said most users
	of the company's systems navigate through Britain's
	sometimes-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."


Not sure I would equate an A-level in English to a U.S. high school
diploma -- it's probably more like an AP English class over here --
but I found the argument over the changing city identity intriguing.

One has a tendency to forget just how much political turmoil surrounds
the cool, clean lines of sans serif type -- with or without those
"sweet-looking" apostrophes -- on modern signage.

Deborah
_____

Deborah Taylor-Pearce
[email protected]






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