Weak Speak

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Digression: comic

November 01, 2007

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http://xkcd.com/327/

Superb. Oh, and http://xkcd.com/326/

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Weak Speak?

I expect that you're wondering what the term weak speak means. So am I. It just popped out of my mouth one day before my brain had time to analyse it. I think I meant it as a loose pun on l33tspeak. There are precedents for prefixing the word speak in this way (thank you Mr. Orwell). Perhaps it's a meme waiting to happen. It does have a pleasing rhyme, after all. A quick google confirmed that my coinage isn't original, but no-one had claimed it for their own. I registered the domain name on a whim about ten minutes later. For various reasons I wish hadn't bothered now, but I might as well make use of it. Hence this blog - I'm too lazy to actually create a proper site. What would it contain, anyway?

Birmingham's lost apostrophes

Martin Mullaney, councillor for Moseley and Kings Heath (sic) Ward, has blogged that apostrophes in Birmingham's road signs will "not be re-introduced" (sic) . He provides the following "reasons" for this "proposal": consistency, avoiding confusion, cost, and confusion. (Yes, really.) I couldn't have imagined how the inclusion of an apostrophe might lead to confusion, but clearly Mr Mullaney has investigated the matter thoroughly: It would be tragic if the ambulance couldn't find your street, if you forgot to include the possessive apostrophe when calling 999. I'm thankful that I don't live on King's Road. I can imagine that in my haste to contact the Emergency Services I might well forget to explain to the operator that the driver should be looking for King- apostrophe -s Road. I feel fortunate that we have such competent people in positions of authority. Perhaps Mr Mullaney should investigate the possibility of introducing a na...

Those roads are not my council's

On the 10th of February I joked that Birmingham City Council would remove the apostrophe from signage at the Birmingham Children's Hospital, not realising this was in fact their intention. An incriminating photograph is available on the Daily Mail 's website. Now presumably a perfectly adequate sign was intentionally removed as part of this insidious plan. Surely such a replacement runs counter to Councillor Mullaney's stated aims of consistency ( certainly their website makes use of apostrophes ) and avoiding unnecessary cost. As I'm sure you are aware Wakefield Council has announced a similar axing of apostrophes in road signs, again citing unspecified problems with interoperability of computer systems. Does this sound reasonable to you? We know that such punctuation is not an issue for GPS navigation systems or Ordnance Survey ( or indeed Google , who appear to have updated their data accordingly ). Is a council likely to maintain its own database for storing road...

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