North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

A local authority has announced it will ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems.

North Yorkshire Council is to ditch the problematic punctuation point as it says it can affect geographical databases.

The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of previous use.

Residents spoken to by the BBC urged the authority to retain apostrophes or risk “everything going downhill”.

However, residents the BBC spoke to were generally not pleased with the council’s plans.

Postie Sam was just finishing her round when we caught up with her near a new St Mary’s Walk sign that had been erected in the town with no apostrophe.

However, it had since been altered to include one by an unknown hand with a pen.

She said, “I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation.”

The former teacher said she thought it was “brilliant” someone had added the punctuation mark.

She said that she spent time teaching children the basics of grammar only for it now to be abandoned on street signs.

Resident Anne Keywood did not think the changes were worthwhile.

She said: “I think we should be using apostrophes.

“If you start losing things like that then everything goes downhill doesn’t it?”

Her husband of 52 years, Andrew, said the signs should be put back to their original state – including an apostrophe.

Ruby Wang, who works at a Japanese restaurant in the town, did not mind the changes.

“To be honest with you, because I’m not from this country it doesn’t matter because it’s the same pronunciation,” she added.

Dr Ellie Rye, who is a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of York, said apostrophes were a relatively new invention in our writing.

“In writing you could say they might disambiguate things that could be ambiguous, so they differentiate between two St Marys walking down the street arm in arm, and ‘I live on St Mary’s Walk’ but in practice those two statements aren’t really ambiguous.

“If I say I live on St Mary’s Walk, we’re expecting a street name or an address of some kind.”

She added the change would matter to people who spend a long time teaching how we write English but that it was “less important in [verbal] communication.”

North Yorkshire Council said it “along with many others across the country” had opted to “eliminate” the apostrophe from street signs.

A spokesperson added: “All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666.

“This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (e.g. apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems.”