Wrong Punctuation Usage Gains Government Backing

Note: I was in the mood to point out an injustice today, but all I could come up with is this very British punctuation problem. Meanwhile, the ground hog went back into his hole, eager to escape his annual ritual of barbarity. God save the queen and large rodents too.

I wasn’t an English major while in college, but I did attend a liberal arts school that was big on stressing writing across all subjects. Even though I was a business major, term papers and other writing projects were a way of life, something I came to expect each semester.

From high school through college and throughout the working world, I’ve always had to write papers, submit reports, build business manuals, you name it. In most cases I’ve done rather well with my work, though I’ve had my struggles with punctuation and the occasional improper use of grammar.

But, I’ve been stickler to uphold generally accepted writing rules even when those rules change on occasion. I keep a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style near by, but only thumb through it when I’m stuck. For the most part, if I need to find out whether to use an em dash or an en dash or resolve some other mystery, that answer can easily be retrieved online.

My early struggles with punctuation has helped me to fine tune that aspect of my writing, so much so that I don’t mind proofreading aviation manuals and the like to look for mistakes (yawn!) What I don’t like is finding habitual punctuation errors, wholesale corporate endorsed changes that can make the grammarian in me cringe.

British English Tosses The Apostrophe

In Birmingham, United Kingdom, it seems that the government there has embraced a policy where the apostrophe has been eliminated — that all important punctuation mark which denotes a possessive or can also be used in contractions such as in don’t, won’t, couldn’t, etc. In England’s second most populous city, the vaunted apostrophe has been officially banished as a possessive so that the queen’s English now reads queens English.

Ugh.

Apparently, the “apostrophe free” movement in Birmingham has been going on since the 1950s when the government began to drop them from street signs. That habit has spread to other signage around the city to where Acock’s Green now reads Acocks Green. Sheer laziness!

Behind the city’s push to officially drop apostrophes is an argument on what to call the suburb located just south of Birmingham center. Kings Heath is no longer owned by the monarchy, thus making for a compelling reason why the apostrophe has been dropped in “modern” times.

Blaming TomTom?

Then there is the more practical 21st century argument — GPS units may get confused by an apostrophe. Birmingham city councilor Martin Mullaney, a proponent of nixing the apostrophe, claims that units such as TomTom don’t use apostrophes to identify landmarks, as adding them in creates confusion. GPS devices are used by citizens as well as by emergency personnel to find their way around the city’s labyrinth of roads.

However, a TomTom representative claims that most people search for Birmingham locations by means of a postal code, but for those who do search by location name a list of choices is returned before the apostrophe is needed, as in the case of St. Mary’s Road. From there, users can choose the right address and get their directions.

Messing With English — Not On Their Watch

I always thought that there were some sort of British Society for the Preservation of the English Language Once Delivered, but have learned to my surprise that no formal national body exists. Instead, groups such as the Plain English Society have taken up the mantle to preserve the language, taking corporations, governments and individuals to task by being “…against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information.”

And it is a good thing too. While Americans have been inventing various post Modern English words for decades, the language deconstructing poison has now spread to the homeland of one of the world’s richest languages, the very nation that birthed a tongue that is widely spoken by hundreds of millions around the world.

It doesn’t appear that 10 Downing Street has plans to dispatch an envoy to correct the wayward punctuation practices of breakaway Birmingham in the near future. Thus, it is up English language wordsmiths the world over to come together to fight this scourge, saving the apostrophe from certain ruin.

First the apostrophe goes, then next they’ll be after the beloved semi-colon — a move that will cause my caustic sophomore year Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Pinever, to roll over in her grave.

May God save the queen…and the English language too!