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North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

bbc.co.uk

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Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#141

Post by shadowgovt »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #135
shadowgovt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different issue. In that case, the vendor had given some guarantees of consistency of data across network nodes that the network didn't actually support. Because there were guarantees, the law went looking for horses instead of zebras, and the "horses" in this case were that only a few people had admin rights to mess with the transactions and the audit logs. ... but in reality, no human was messing with those; system…

dropping and duplicating data is exactly the symptom you get from not sanitising aprostrophies in your data correctly.

Not at all. If I understand correctly, the failure to synchronize was a fundamental flaw in the the networking code and had nothing to do with the payloads inside the networking code.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#142

Post by Affric »

arrowsmith wrote: post #119
swores wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you're not going to Tesco the registered company, you're going to (one of) Tesco's (shops). It's just traditional and logical grammar, not misnaming.

This is not true. We don't apply this "rule" to any other establishment, e.g. people don't say "I'm going to Burger King's" or "I'm going to Costa's". There's nothing to analyze: "Tesco's" is just wrong . It's not the name of the business.

lol… I am glad for you that you haven’t heard those yet.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#143

Post by dfawcus »

graypegg wrote: post #80

As far as I can tell, this isn't an issue with the specific database itself, but the standard they are required to record geographic data in, which the end of the article mentions as "BS 7666". https://www.agi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BS7666Guid... # Standard data types used in BS 7666 CharacterString: a sequence of alphanumeric characters ... If I had to guess, alphanumeric is interpreted as [0-9a-z]. The s…

Better not prod Falkirk council, as otherwise they'd have the issue of Bo'ness vs Borrowstounness to deal with.

Similarly Grangemouth apparently has a Bo'ness Road...

A related issue would be places in England named 'by-the-Sea', e.g. Newbiggin-by-the-Sea.

So the signs shall simply have to match reality.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#144

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

amluto wrote: post #77
shadowgovt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My local (US) county has a web service to look up property deeds and titles. They "solved" this problem by just having you enter the street name with no punctuation or suffix (ave, st, etc), and if there is a collision the form pops out a drop-down selector to have you disambiguate. It's not the cleanest solution but it works. I agree that bending the humans to serve the needs of the machine feels... Sub-optimal.

To be fair, a degree of fuzziness in matching is quite valuable. Is it Eighth Ave, 8th Ave, Eighth Avenue or 8th Avenue? Or W 8th Ave, perhaps? Is that deed for Unit 7 or Apt 7 or #7 or Ste 7? Is the street address 15 8th Ave or 015 8th Ave? In cases where one zip code spans multiple cities, should anyone really be matching on the city? How about communities in a city in which no one is quite sure what goes in the ci…

My favorite confusing street I've dealt with is Boulevard in Hartford, CT[1]. Often abbreviated, so addresses like "1600 Blvd" are common. And of course there are streets where "boulevard" is the last word in the name, like usual, to add to confusion.

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1091898993

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#145

Post by iainmerrick »

arrowsmith wrote: post #119
swores wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you're not going to Tesco the registered company, you're going to (one of) Tesco's (shops). It's just traditional and logical grammar, not misnaming.

This is not true. We don't apply this "rule" to any other establishment, e.g. people don't say "I'm going to Burger King's" or "I'm going to Costa's". There's nothing to analyze: "Tesco's" is just wrong . It's not the name of the business.

people don't say "I'm going to Burger King's" or "I'm going to Costa's"

Oh yes they do!

There's nothing to analyze: "Tesco's" is just wrong.

It’s kind of funny that there are prescriptivists on both sides here, all convinced that they’re right.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#146

Post by kibwen »

DougBTX wrote: post #99
graypegg wrote: post #80

As far as I can tell, this isn't an issue with the specific database itself, but the standard they are required to record geographic data in, which the end of the article mentions as "BS 7666". https://www.agi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BS7666Guid... # Standard data types used in BS 7666 CharacterString: a sequence of alphanumeric characters ... If I had to guess, alphanumeric is interpreted as [0-9a-z]. The s…

Such a strict interpretation would also exclude spaces.

FORTUNATELYSPACESAREARELATIVELYNEWINVENTIONASARELOWERCASELETTERSANDPUNCTUATIONINGENERAL

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#147

Post by TylerE »

iainmerrick wrote: post #145
arrowsmith wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. We don't apply this "rule" to any other establishment, e.g. people don't say "I'm going to Burger King's" or "I'm going to Costa's". There's nothing to analyze: "Tesco's" is just wrong . It's not the name of the business.

people don't say "I'm going to Burger King's" or "I'm going to Costa's" Oh yes they do! There's nothing to analyze: "Tesco's" is just wrong. It’s kind of funny that there are prescriptivists on both sides here, all convinced that they’re right.

In 40 years I have no seen such usage in print

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#148

Post by jjgreen »

adolph wrote: post #115
DougBTX wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a strict interpretation would also exclude spaces.

at least over there something would probably "isle of pen" rather than "pen island"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penistone

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#149

Post by TylerE »

thfuran wrote: post #133
cykros wrote: post #34

This seems silly for the reason they're doing it, in that a modern database should be able to handle characters with a little sanitation. However, it does seem like it could be helpful when it comes to satnav applications to remove ambiguity. Google's going to autocorrect most of the time anyway, but this way, you're less likely to run into an issue where it takes you to Kings Landing in the wrong town because you di…

>but this way, you're less likely to run into an issue where it takes you to Kings Landing in the wrong town because you didn't type King's Landing in the town you meant. That's pretty uncompelling. Should we also get rid of the letter s to avoid mix-ups between Kings Landing and King Landing?

Devils advocate: the apostrophe isn’t pronounced. The s is.
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