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North Yorkshire Apostrophe Fans Demand Road Signs With Nowt Taken Out (theguardian.com) 86

Posted by msmash from the what's-in-a-name dept.
A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems. From a report: North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases. The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past. Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked "everything going downhill." They urged the authority to retain them.

Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe -- such as the nearby St Mary's Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it -- infuriated her. "I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation," she said. Though the updated St Mary's sign had no apostrophe, someone had graffitied an apostrophe back on to the sign with a marker pen, which the former teacher said was "brilliant." She suggested the council was providing a bad example to children who spend a long time learning the basics of grammar only to see it not being used correctly on street signs.

Dr Ellie Rye, a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of York, said apostrophes were a relatively new invention in our writing and, often, context allows people to understand their meaning. "If I say I live on St Mary's Walk, we're expecting a street name or an address of some kind." She said 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."
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North Yorkshire Apostrophe Fans Demand Road Signs With Nowt Taken Out More

North Yorkshire Apostrophe Fans Demand Road Signs With Nowt Taken Out

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  • Fix the kempewters (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ossifer ( 703813 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @02:40PM (#64452052)

    Donâ(TM)t water down the language to avoid writing good code.

    • Excellent use of slashdotting. Don't water down the language to avoid good social media posting, either.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Hey idiot, no on ever said "Don't water down the language...", they said "Donâ(TM)t water down the language...".

        • Use this opportunity to vigorously debate in all media the case for using grammatically correct road signs and case against using grammatically correct road signs

          to filibuster the stream of nonsense for the 2024 US presidential election news media, politicians, debates, .troll farms, ...

          Conversation starters
          - Road signs and grammar and its effects on the tidal bore
          - Road sign grammar and its effects on the early Roman empire
          - Road sign grammar and the utility of finding useful sticks in the woods
          - Road sign

    • Re:Fix the kempewters (Score:5, Funny)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @03:15PM (#64452120)

      Donâ(TM)t water down the language to avoid writing good code.

      Alternative: Simply make all the signs using Apple devices -- St. Maryâ(TM)s Walk -- no apostrophes! :-)

      • You joke, but a developer may have actually tried to enter a street name on a test form using an Apple device, and this did actually happen and the developer said 'it doesn't allow apostrophes', and since that developer is probably a family hire, the council member that hired them had to choose between firing the family member and enforcing a 'no apostrophe' rule.

        This is how stupid rules are made.
    • Exactly. There's nowt wrong wi' owt what mitherin' clutterbucks don't barley grummit, apostrophes an' all.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @02:40PM (#64452054)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • My thesis advisor's name was also Null. Keep having problems with web sites. Notice the proper use of apostrophes.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by davidwr ( 791652 )

        There's a big difference between Null's Thesis and the Null hypothesis.

        Of course, with more than one Null out there, and with some possibly having more than one thesis, we should be talking about Nulls' theses.

    • Reminds me of the guy who's name is NULL: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/... [wired.com]

      Is he a relative of Little Bobby Tables [xkcd.com]?

    • Four months later the BBC had similar article [bbc.com] about people whose last name is Null, including a woman who was marrying a man with that last name.

      The article also mentions other issues some people have because of their name either being too short or too long, and it's not just in the English-speaking world.

    • Reminds me of the guy who's name is NULL: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/ [wired.com]...

      There is an actress named Rachel True with a considerable entry on Wikipedia, who has similar problems with all kinds of software that doesn't like "true" in an SQL command.

      Seems to may paranoid fear of SQL injections. I haven't been able to find out how this name could cause any problems unless you have totally broken code that wants a boolean value, gets a string, accepts it and turns it into a boolean.

    • There's this fun situation where the French representative "fell asleep or something to that effect" at a meeting and missed that 3 characters are missing from ISO-8859: , , and .

  • Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by poptix ( 78287 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @02:43PM (#64452058) Homepage

    Imagine your code is so bad that you have to do this.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's a fucking disgrace

    • Yes well Harrogate Town Council was never really impressive when I was growing up there and North Yorkshire Country Council was no different so this does not surprise me at all. In Harrogate though there were a lot of street names with apostrophes in the neighbourhood I grew up in, all named after saints: St Helen's Road, St Leonards's Road, St Winifred's etc. probably due to the nearby convent although I always thought the touwn council was responsible for street signs, not the country council.

      If their

    • Re:Yikes (Score:5, Funny)

      by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @03:55PM (#64452280) Homepage Journal

      They say itâ(TM)s âoetoo difficultâ!

      • The behaviour of this site when you use non-ASCII UTF-8 is an utter disgrace and utterly shameful.
    • Apparently it's not the coders, it's the standard they've got to code against - BS7666 [agi.org.uk]

      From Annex D. Explanation of Unified Modelling Language (UML) notation:

      CharacterString: a sequence of alphanumeric characters

      So no apostrophes.

      • This is why when the standard is just plain dumb you ask for an extension to it, and just say it won't work as is. Or turn into a damned developer and actually solve the problem.

        What were they using before? It was clearly superior. Even Slashdot can handle (some) apostrophes, don't cha know.

      • Re:Yikes (Score:4, Funny)

        by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @05:14PM (#64452494)

        Apparently it's not the coders, it's the standard they've got to code against - BS7666 [agi.org.uk] From Annex D. Explanation of Unified Modelling Language (UML) notation:

        CharacterString: a sequence of alphanumeric characters

        So no apostrophes.

        So... "St Maryapostrophes Way" ?

      • Re:Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @05:36PM (#64452542)

        You're taking it more literally than the writers of that document intended. Later on in the standard you'll read that they allow for the specification of a character set, including those from languages other than English (Welsh is specifically cited, for instance), and Part 2 of the document from just a few months later [agi.org.uk] suggests as an example that the characters in UTF-8 would be perfectly valid. It even uses a a road name that has a possessive—Earl's Court Road—as an example for when it would be acceptable to include punctuation.

        It's clear that the goal was never to limit the field to the literal Roman alphabet and 10 digits, and that to the degree that the term "alphanumeric" imposes such restrictions, those restrictions are contrary to the intent of the document's authors.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Allowing UTF-8 in road signs could lead to some interesting trolling, thanks to half baked ideas like the right-to-left metadata character, or the random silly fonts it includes.

    • Imagine your code is so bad that you have to do this.

      LOL. Imagine if you spoke Unicode instead of English.

    • Imagine your code is so bad that you have to do this.

      No need to imagine, most code is so bad. There are orders of magnitude more computer systems and databases in the world than there are good programmers.

  • If we need things to be computer readable, as they wrongly claim, why not include binary on all the signs?

    Reminds me I need to order some bumper stickers that say:

    Hello'); DROP TABLE log;--

    • What use case do you have for street name signs to be computer readable? Delivery companies use - as far as I can tell - geographic coordinates to direct delivery drivers (leading to things like Amazon drivers having to turn off data on their phones in order to deliver to premises where the delivery location has been wrongly encoded, and the driver has to deliver to a location distant form the nominal delivery location - farms were great for this, "leave parcels in the barn with the red door". Few delivery

      • I think you're right. And I think the whole thing is a bit nuts. And I'm pretty sure I'd I am driving a car around with a camera to refresh my company database that it is not hard for software to correctly read most of the signage, and flag ones that are difficult for a human to decipher.

        • it is not hard for software to correctly read most of the signage, and flag ones that are difficult for a human to decipher.

          So, Amazon shut down their "Mechanical Turk" service? Or is that dressed up in the clothes of an "AI solution" by some "fake it 'til you make it" startup?

          How much does a room full of English-speaking (or in this case, -reading) Indian wage slaves cost these days?

  • Writing is a kind of speech compression and it does not need to be lossless to be understandable. Hebrew is written with only one sign for all vowels and no diacritical marks and people can read it perfectly fine.
    • But it's a PITA to learn. English at least gives you a hint on how to pronounce a word without hearing it first or looking it up on a dictionary. More than a hint. Most single syllable words in English have predictable pronunciations from the spelling. I wonder if even people who have mastered Hebrew are able to pronounce every single word of it.

      • English at least gives ou a hint on how to pronounce a word without hearing it first or looking it up on a dictionary. More than a hint. Most single syllable words in English have predictable pronunciations from the spelling.

        LOL! English has some of the most irregular spelling of any language. It comes from centuries of trying to force germanic and latin languages together, at the same time as stealing useful new words from all over the world and jamming in some Greek when the Oxford dons felt like it.

        Don't like it? Tough. (And try getting a non-native speaker to pronounce just that single one syllable word correctly on the first attempt.)

        If you want regular, predictable spelling you need to look over the channel at the likes o

      • Hebrew is just a pretext to bicker over the correct verbalization. So glad the greeks, then romans were in control during the founding epoch. Having a fashion item of a weapon to pummel the intellectuals was the best thing about citizenship in the roman empire.

    • Hebrew is written with only one sign for all vowels

      They have vowels, they just don't like using them. Txtspk FTW

    • Hebrew, like any other Semitic language, puts the meaning of words on the consonants. Vowels are (mostly) just there to make the whole thing pronounceable.

      As such, there's a specific pattern to what vowels go where. So when you stumble on a new word in writing, you should (at least in theory) be able to pronounce it.

      But it does take time to learn. Especially since there seems to be several such patterns...

  • Apparently North Yorkshire is in dire need of coders who don't understand making strings safe and escaping special characters.
    But wait, there's more.

    The council thinks this is not just OK, but is now disfiguring street signs.
    But wait, there's more.

    Instead of voting out the clowns and fixing the code, the people of North Yorkshire think it's ok to vandalize those same signs.

    Passive aggressive much?

  • I share their frustration - I happen to live in a street the name of which, when correctly entered into online forms, is usually alerted to be "wrong" by whatever demented software those servers run, and then I get proposed "alternative" spellings from their database that are just incorrect. But those British politicians doing this on purpose... that is beyond incompetent, that is just evil.

  • You know what to do.

  • road');drop table roads;-- (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheNameOfNick ( 7286618 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @03:44PM (#64452240)

    Who lost their database to a prank and came up with this solution?

  • How many times have people changed practices, systems, or rules that have worked for however long "so they could work with computers"?

    Has that ever made them BETTER for the people using them? Or just easier for some very tiny group of people?

  • My pet peeve is the use of "get" everywhere like "get out", "get away", instead of the correct terms as "leave" and "escape" for instance.
    It's a decline in literacy which even professional writers display.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Get fucked.

    • Re:Does it matter when language use is already bad (Score:4, Funny)

      by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @05:49PM (#64452572)

      My pet peeve is the use of "get" everywhere like "get out", "get away", instead of the correct terms as "leave" and "escape" for instance. It's a decline in literacy which even professional writers display.

      I dunno, there's a kind of weird eloquence when you think about it. "Get away" is really "acquire distance", for instance. And "get out" is really "procure exodus".

      There's excellent precedent for this as well. For instance the modern phrase "bitch, shut up" has for centuries been written as "get thee to a nunnery".

    • It's a decline in literacy

      No it ain't.

  • They should have replaced 's with z

  • I think we are always glad to save developers from doing actual work. Oh, I have to enter my phone number without any dashes because that breaks your web form? I am soooooo sorry! I eagerly await the day all the signs just have QR codes on them that are subsequently hijacked to point to malware downloads. Good times just around the bend.

    • I'm uncertain of my phone number, so I use tildes. As in 867~5309.

    • Web forms that are picky about phone numbers are a pet peeve of mine. It's usually an indication of how crappy the rest of the data entry experience is going to be. Dashes or parentheses are handy for quick human readability and should be benign to phone number entry. If you don't like other characters, pull out the 10 digits and just chuck the rest.
      I have similar issues with my address which includes "#1234" Not apartment, not suite. But now and then some lame-ass web coder decided there is no addres

      • Yes, or any other field at all with the words "Do not include spaces or punctuation" above it.

        Computing requires a bit a brains and a bit of empathy. A huge fraction of coders lack one or the other.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Leading zeros in phone numbers break a lot of stuff. Google Chrome will remember your phone number to save you entering it, but in the local dialling format that starts with a zero, or in international format that starts with a +. Either way, most websites seem to want you to enter the country code and number separately, so no matter what Google auto-fills it will be wrong.

  • You will live on St. Mary's Street and you will be happy.

  • Computers should not limit one from using symbols, that should be addressed. But screw the people that cant handle that I didnt use an apostrophe in this sentence.

  • Wtf is "nowt"?

  • Computers run our lives.
    Computers too hard to fix.
    Accommodate the computers.

    The world is inverted..

    Soon we will all suck AI dick and spread our asses to service the machines.

    And I for one, do NOT welcome out hallucinating digital overlords....

    If apostrophe's in user interfaces are too hard, perhaps our race really deserves to be flushed.
    But rest easy, for the AI will fix that code after we are gone.

    Think of it as technical debt.
    Think of it as evolution in action.

    At least now we know why we can't find the al

    • There's a good sci-fi angle on these statements:
      Think of it as technical debt.
      Think of it as evolution in action.

      Consider IBM and Technical Debt. Companies are basically stuck with legacy systems for a variety of reasons.

      The sci-fi take is AI keeping human arounds for a variety of different reasons.

      We would be Biological Debt... (that would be the show title...)

  • If we can just ignore the rules at our leisure, why even have them?
  • There is a long standing convention around geographical names that forbids the use of apostrophes. Besides English doesnâ(TM)t belong to the English anymore, and the rest of the world has no idea what apostrophes are for.

  • For once I'm rooting for the "troglodytes". Their new encoding standard is bleeped up, not the streets. Pressure the fools to fix the standard.

  • ...and follow Mark Twain's suggestions [math.rug.nl]!
  • Last month the director put up a whiteboard and started writing 'inspirational' messages from famous authors/poets. The most recent utterance had three "its". Two of them contained apostrophes. Fortunately a finger is good for editing such on a whiteboard.

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