LONDON — A local council in southern England has sparked a grammar war with proposals to ban the apostrophe from its street signs to avoid what it calls “adverse consequences in times of emergency.”
Guardians of English this week leapt to the defense of the language’s most misunderstood and misused punctuation mark in a furor that even prompted reaction from the government in London.
The Mid Devon Council, which has authority for naming streets in its particular corner of southwestern England, fired the opening shot by adopting a recommendation to outlaw the apostrophe in order to avoid confusion.
Example: Bakers Street, yes; Baker’s Street, no.
The Plain English Campaign hit back by denouncing the ban as nonsensical. “Where’s it going to stop?” asked Steve Jenner, the group’s spokesman. “Are we going to declare war on commas, outlaw full stops?”
Mary de Vere Taylor, a copy editor who lives in the district, told the BBC she shuddered at the thought of the ban. “It’s almost as though somebody with a giant eraser is literally trying to erase punctuation from our consciousness,” she said.
Skirmishes over the wayward apostrophe are nothing new in the English-speaking world and generally involve its misuse.
Writing about Presidents’ Day (or is it President’s Day, or even Presidents Day?) in 2011, my colleague Clyde Haberman noted: “That apostrophe floats more than the dollar does in international currency markets. In the process, logic is sometimes held hostage.”
Pro-apostrophe activists have included Sister Miriam Thomas, a Bronx community leader who campaigned to put the punctuation mark back into Hunts Point, a neighborhood in New York City borough of The Bronx.
And my colleague Sarah Lyall wrote in 2001 about the passions that led to the founding in Lincolnshire of the Apostrophe Protection Society.
Others have argued equally forcefully that what George Bernard Shaw, the Irish writer, called the “uncouth bacilli” of English grammar should be scrapped.
Sometimes the problem is a surfeit of apostrophes, rather than their absence.
The British even have a term – “greengrocer’s English” – inspired by the signs of street traders advertising “apple’s” and “potato’s.”
That may be the kind of confusion that the Mid Devon Council had in mind when it decided to solve the problem by scrapping the troublesome punctuation mark entirely.
Clearly irked by the unwanted attention, Peter Hare-Scott, the council leader, told The Guardian newspaper: “There’s not really a story here. Doesn’t the Plain English Society have better things to do like improving grammar in schools?”
A government spokesman told the same newspaper: “Whilst this is ultimately a matter for the local council, ministers’ view is that England’s apostrophes should be cherished.”
The Conservative-led government is currently introducing a formal grammar and punctuation examination at age 11 in British schools.
The move has been criticized by some teachers as reflecting the government’s obsession with tests more than its desire to preserve correct usage in an era of texting and Twitter.
The BBC offers a more informal test for adults who want to check their punctuation. And our own After Deadline blog is always a good place to check out usage and style — apostrophes included.
Do you get irritated by misuse of the apostrophe? Is better schooling the answer, or should we follow the Mid Devon example? Tell us what you think.