A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems.
North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases.
The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past.
Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked “everything going downhill”. They urged the authority to retain them.
Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe – such as the nearby St Mary’s Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it – infuriated her.
“I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation,” she said.
Though the updated St Mary’s sign had no apostrophe, someone had graffitied an apostrophe back on to the sign with a marker pen, which the former teacher said was “brilliant”.
She suggested the council was providing a bad example to children who spend a long time learning the basics of grammar only to see it not being used correctly on street signs.
Dr Ellie Rye, a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of York, said apostrophes were a relatively new invention in our writing and, often, context allows people to understand their meaning.
“If I say I live on St Mary’s Walk, we’re expecting a street name or an address of some kind.”
She said the change would matter to people who spend a long time teaching how we write English but that it was “less important in [verbal] communication”.
North Yorkshire council said it was not the first to opt to “eliminate” the apostrophe from street signs. Cambridge city council had done the same, before it bowed to pressure and reinstated the apostrophe after complaints from campaigners.
There was also an outcry from residents when Mid Devon district council considered making it a policy to do away with apostrophes to “avoid potential confusion”.
A spokesperson from North Yorkshire council added: “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 (eg apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems.”
