On the dingy, grey streets of Birmingham the Queen’s English is now… the Queens English. You heard me. A recent ruling by the Birmingham City Council has ruled that apostrophe’s will be outlawed on all new signs. St Paul’s Square? Its now St Pauls Square.
The president of the Apostrophe Protection Society (no, I’m not making it up, it was formed in 2001, in Boston) described it as ‘absolute defeatism’. I’d describe it as apathetical abject horror. Complete dissolution of everything that our imperialistic forefathers stood for! They didn’t fight back the French time and time again or push the Vikings from our lands so that we could… give up the fight and give in to illiteracy and pedanticism. If you’re a pedant wondering if I just made up that word — maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.
The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names should ever take an apostrophe.
Apparently people have actually been sending in letters to the council to ask if Druid’s Grove once belonged to a Druid. Now there’ll be no ambiguity: it’s a grove for lots of druids. Birmingham City Council has decreed it, and thus it shall forever be. Wonderful.
Apostrophe’s have long been a bone of contention all over the English-speaking world (do other languages use them to denote possession like us? Or just elision? Wiki knows all!) The problem is: they require a certain level of literacy to be used correctly — not a vast level, but certainly some literacy. Grocery store owners, market sellers and other workers that are unlikely to be school-educated are notoriously bad at placing the apostrophe correctly — check these out:
The last one is all kind’s of wrong — it features extraneous and sorely lacking apostrophes AND misuse of quotation marks (there’s a gallery for misused quotation marks, if that’s your kind of thing).
This rampant militarism for and against the apostrophe is nothing new though. While taking it a bit too far, there’s even a site dedicated to killing the apostrophe. On the other, slightly more moderate hand, fighting the cause of the noble and functional apostrophe there’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a book which all of you should read (especially the bloggers out there that like to really nail their grammar use). Also on our side — and I assume you are all on my side – are the lovely AAAA — Americans Against Apostrophe Abuse — although it looks like their site hasn’t been updated since 2005. Maybe I should pick up the battle standard, sound my horn and beat the drum’s of waaaar!
Sadly this is just one more nail in the coffin for our lovely language. If English teachers in Birmingham thought they had it bad with the increase in illiteracy caused by ‘netspeak’ (incidentally, by far the easiest way to tell if the person you’re talking to has a sub-100 IQ is to see if they ask ‘howz r u 2day lol??’), it’s going to get a lot harder with the abolition of apostrophes.
But perhaps, and I feel we’ll probably have to admit defeat in the grand scale of things, this is just the natural progression of our language. It’s sad though: part of the reason Shakespeare’s 500 year old scripts are still readable today is because our language has slowly evolved, taking on new words and nuances as necessity dictates, rather than revolutionary overhauls (like the removal of the apostrophe) that have afflicted other languages around the world. LOL, I really hope it isnt time to embrace our new, simplified possession-free world.
Maddie
Feb 8, 2009
i like that the first two pictures are of items that should have been payed a little more attention to. You should know things about grammar if you are screen printing something on t-shirts or if you are a professional sign company. I guess I can forgive Tasti D-lite. It’s not even real ice cream, so I can’t say I care.
Jo
Feb 8, 2009
Oh no if we lose all punctuation whos going to know whats said by who and whose things they belong to and if it is possessive or not and it will all end in a horrible mess noone will be able to understand eachothers writings and more and meanings will become ambiguous it will be a disaster
Daniel Cassidy
Feb 8, 2009
The misused quotation mark is “one feature of illiterism I have never been able to understand”. At least one person I know puts quotation marks around “whole gobs of sentences for no apparent reason”. You’d think from time to time they’d “look at someone else’s writing and wonder why there aren’t so many quotes”.
I am in favour of shooting anyone who can’t punctuate properly in their first language by the age of 21, for the good of the gene pool.
sebastian
Feb 8, 2009
We’ve always been scarily alike, Daniel… We’re both like that crazed Roman emperor that wanted to kill all those babies…
Maddie — was the spelling mistake INTENTIONAL?!
Jo — I think you should write like that more often, it suits your monster. All big and hairy and eclectic.
gary
Feb 8, 2009
oh god…leetspeak…..twitch*
sebastian
Feb 8, 2009
We’ve all done it once upon a time…
At least us gamers…
But we grow out of it. Some of us. A few of us. And then we write blogs about our experiences!
‘How I fought through l33tsp43k and came out the other side’
Jo
Feb 8, 2009
“OMG” Gary has the same ‘body type’ as my monster! Does that mean that we are “genetically related”?
sebastian
Feb 8, 2009
ROFL… well, lets not get too involved in the theory of evolution of monsters. It maynt have a happy ending.
charlee
Feb 8, 2009
haha i think i love you!!! this is amazing!
sebastian
Feb 8, 2009
Wooing women has never been so easy!
Eleni
Feb 9, 2009
This is tragic news. That “Professional sign’s” sign makes me cringe, but at least it would be outlawed by the new Birmingham rule. But St. Pauls Square? How many of them were there?
I will say, though, that the U.S. Board on Geographical Names has deprecated the use of apostrophes in geographical names since 1890 (thanks, Wikipedia). This is what is to blame for the fact that I work at Bugle Hill Lab located on Bugles Hill Road (which causes some confusion). The road dropped the apostrophe but the lab decided to drop the “s” as well.
sebastian
Feb 10, 2009
Wow… I had no idea. Although looking back on my few trips to the USA, I do recall a general lack of apostrophes. Of course, the illiterate types made up for it with an excess of apostrophes in other places…
You’re right on the St Paul thing though!