Your article (North Yorkshire apostrophe fans demand road signs with nowt taken out, 5 May) made me cheer. Here in Nova Scotia, Canada, it’s rare to find an apostrophised community name, even when it begs for one – for example, our famous tourist attraction, Peggys Cove. Apostrophes were dropped many years ago in the interests of marine safety. Our province is so small that cartographers had to extend the names of communities out into the sea portion of their maps. This often led to confusion among mariners who kept mistaking these little pieces of punctuation for rocks.
So, no more apostrophes for Nova Scotians, to this very day.
Peter Duffy
Bedford, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Apostrophism isn’t (sorry) only a matter of grammar. When I register with online organisations, the software often tells me that my surname is “invalid”, and records me as “Obrien”. From being mildly annoyed, I now regard this as offensive.
North Yorkshire council’s claim that the apostrophe “can affect geographical databases” is in the category of “computer says no”. The French would never tolerate such impertinence: who in their right mind would strip the grammar from “Avenue des Champs-Élysées”?
I wrote a medical database covering a population of about 50,000 patients; even as an amateur programmer, I easily accommodated all variations of people’s and places’ names. Whatever BS7666 says, it’s perfectly simple to strip non-alphabetic characters from database search queries, and North Yorkshire is giving in to careless and lazy programming. The Post Office experience makes one wonder whatever else such bad software will do.
Dr Richard O’Brien
Highbridge, Somerset
• Spare a thought for us poor souls with apostrophes in our names. Frankly, they’re a damned nuisance, but they’re our heritage, and I’m reluctant to jettison mine. In my case, the inconvenience is compounded by my surname starting with a lower case letter.
Ian d’Alton
Naas, County Kildare, Ireland
• I sympathise which those who object to the ditching of apostrophes on street signs. I live near to St Gildas Road in Cardiff and for years have been annoyed by the lack of an apostrophe. It was only very recently that one of my neighbours informed me the saint’s name is actually Gildas.
Mike Pender
Cardiff
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