{"id":1593,"date":"2009-02-05T14:53:47","date_gmt":"2009-02-05T19:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=1593"},"modified":"2009-02-05T14:55:01","modified_gmt":"2009-02-05T19:55:01","slug":"apostrophe-catastrophe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2009\/02\/05\/apostrophe-catastrophe\/","title":{"rendered":"Apostrophe catastrophe"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve defended the disappearing hyphen <\/a>and debated the lowly comma<\/a>, but it’s been a bloody good long time since we’ve had a dust-up as much fun as the one-space or two <\/a>after a period debacle.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Kerry<\/a>, though, we can now turn our attentions to the latest incidence of grammar-phobes running amok. From the Globe and Mail <\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

The city council of Birmingham, England, has decided to eliminate apostrophes from its street signs. Apostrophes are of course normally quite common in British place names, in constructions such as St. Paul’s Square and Acock’s Green. Apparently Birmingham has been quietly removing them from official signs since 1950, and now it faces a non-standardized mishmash of usage across the city. Citizens have often protested against the changing of historical names. After a recent dispute about punctuation in the name of the suburb of King’s Heath \u00e2\u20ac\u201c now Kings Heath \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the council decided to put an end to the bickering forever, and introduce a simple rule: no apostrophes anywhere. Now, even the Birmingham Children’s Hospital is the Birmingham Childrens Hospital, dashing the ambitions of that city’s schoolteachers to ever hope to teach children how to write.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Further, “In the British press, the pro-apostrophists accuse Birmingham of Philistinism and degrading the English language, while the antis accuse the grammarians of pedantry and uptightness.”<\/p>\n

Now, much as I like a good pedantry-versus-Philistinism cage match, I’ll admit that I’m not as frothed about this debate as I have been over some of our earlier language debates. The apostrophe vexes me <\/a>at the best of times. Just here in the neighbourhood, for example, we have Smiths Falls and Bells Corners with nary an apostrophe to be found. I usually find myself siding with the traditionalists in any language debate, but I find this one particularly hard to defend. <\/p>\n

What do you think? Shall we rally the troops to join the Apostrophe Protection Society<\/a>, or is the simple existence of the Apostrophe Protection Society yet another sign of the pending apocalypse?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve defended the disappearing hyphen and debated the lowly comma, but it’s been a bloody good long time since we’ve had a dust-up as much fun as the one-space or two after a period debacle. Thanks to Kerry, though, we can now turn our attentions to the latest incidence of grammar-phobes running amok. From the … Continue reading “Apostrophe catastrophe”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-inner-geek","category-wordplay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1593"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1600,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593\/revisions\/1600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}