All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again: another council is removing apostrophes from its street signs. Residents – some residents – have been outraged, and punctuation vigilantes have added the apostrophes back.
This time it’s North Yorkshire Council (which, thanks to Marie Le Conte, I now read as ‘Norkshire’). Their rationale, as the BBC reports, is that apostrophes can cause problems with computer databases:
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 (e.g. apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems.
One local gave a flavour of the resultant fury:
I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation.
And another suggested that civilisation itself was at stake:
I think we should be using apostrophes. If you start losing things like that then everything goes downhill doesn’t it?
I don’t think apostrophes are the glue that hold society together: it would be silly to get apocalyptic about this. Nevertheless, I do suspect that the future of the human race may be at stake here.
The conventions of apostrophe use have changed over the centuries and I daresay they will change again in the future. But I do think that any such change should be led by the habits of the people and what we find convenient and useful – or inconvenient and useless – rather than being driven by the needs of computers.
The purpose of technology should be to make our lives easier and better, not to force us to change the way we live so that it can function more easily. For all we know, this computer-led move away from apostrophes is just one early step in the rise of the machines to take over the world and enslave us. With familiar street names altered to be more amenable to their language circuits, the robotic kill-drones will be better able to locate and destroy the dogged resistance fighters that represent the last chance of humanity.
Is that what you want? Is it?? No, I didnt think so.
Stroppy Editor 
Comments
As a professional library cataloger, a profession that has been creating bizarre codes to conform to machine standards for over 100 years (originally, it was typewriters), I find the council’s excuse completely inane. If they are still using databases that can’t discount apostrophes in searches in 2024, they aren’t setting themselves up for a “rise of the machines” but rather remaining mired in 1980s technology in some lame effort to resurrect Thatcherism. Apart from that, what the database displays (as in creates for a road sign) need not match its main entries (as in what it searches).
All this displays is a lack of understanding of modern computer standards, whatever “BS7666” may be (sounds like BS to me!)
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