Jan 30 2009
in which birmingham makes apostrophes cry
I admit it: I’m a grammar Nazi. I worked as the copy editor of UAA’s student-run campus paper, The Northern Light, for almost two full years, and I only quit because I was leaving for my semester in England. (I’d hoped I’d be able to get the job back when I returned, but no such luck.) Blatant grammatical errors kind of hurt my soul; every time I see “your welcome” or “book’s for sale” or what have you, I die a little inside. I’d sort of hoped I’d see less of this in England, since supposedly people are smarter over there (I mean, it’s hard to beat the US for lousy school results, but apparently either that isn’t true or “smarter” doesn’t translate into “actually paid attention in school when they were teaching grammar”).
Well, now England has apparently decided to make that official. The Associated Press reports that Birmingham, England’s second-largest city, has actually banned apostrophes from street signs.
Seriously? What did the poor little apostrophe ever do to you people? Apostrophes are wonderful little beings. Leave them out and you really don’t know whether something’s plural or possessive. (Okay okay, you might know from context, but sometimes you honestly can’t tell.) Learning to use them properly is not that difficult, and abusing them just because you’re too lazy to learn how they’re supposed to be used? Well, that’s just shameful.
The really stupid bit is how the decision was made:
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” or “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 Friday. “We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other 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.”
This seems…counterintuitive. To put it mildly. They’ve been dropping apostrophes for years for no discernible reason, and fellow sticklers have come together to protest this and campaign to get the humble apostrophe reinstated. We have no mention of giant crowds picketing to have apostrophes removed. So to end the debate, they didn’t decide to put all the apostrophes back where they belonged. They banned them wholesale.
This…does not compute.
And that last quote by Mullaney? Do I even have to comment on it? That…pretty much mocks itself, right there.
