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 names? Even if they did, surely they can transform the text on export? What kind of non-standard, unmaintainable, poorly designed systems are they using anyway?
Note to self: if I ever have the opportunity to name a private road I must make it
Is Birmingham's drive to update (modernise?) their public signs saving or costing their constituents money? Is there a genuine problem that needs to be resolved, and is this the most efficient solution to it? Has the amount of mail on the subject processed by council employees actually decreased (as intended)? Will Mullaney be re-elected?!
Any journalists out there might want to consider digging for a story. This makes little sense to me and smacks of a perverse reverse snobbery. Perhaps we can make use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain some actual facts?
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 names? Even if they did, surely they can transform the text on export? What kind of non-standard, unmaintainable, poorly designed systems are they using anyway?
Note to self: if I ever have the opportunity to name a private road I must make it
X'); drop database;--
Is Birmingham's drive to update (modernise?) their public signs saving or costing their constituents money? Is there a genuine problem that needs to be resolved, and is this the most efficient solution to it? Has the amount of mail on the subject processed by council employees actually decreased (as intended)? Will Mullaney be re-elected?!
Any journalists out there might want to consider digging for a story. This makes little sense to me and smacks of a perverse reverse snobbery. Perhaps we can make use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain some actual facts?
Comments
http://www.financialpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=1299900
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/apostrophe.htm