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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

#211

Post by shadowgovt »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #210
shadowgovt wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software glitch that was involved in 1,000 people being arrested had nothing to do with street names. By this point, the flaws are pretty well-documented. If you find anything in the reports about handling of apostrophes, feel free to cite it. The underlying communication protocol from node to node wasn't even SQL; it was an XML format called "Riposte." There was, perhaps, SQL involved in eventual account databas…

source for it being well documented? xml suffers apostrophe issues to. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post... says As early as 2001, McDonnell’s team had found “hundreds” of bugs. A full list has never been produced, seems almost guaranteed to me it had apostrophy bugs.

Source for it being identified as a root cause of the Horizon issues.

As far as I can see, there is no evidence that it was.

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

#212

Post by giraffe_lady »

nullhole wrote: post #57
MarcScott wrote: post #25

I have a street in a town near me which grammatically should be called St. Thomas' road. However, the street signs call it St. Thomas road at the north end and St. Thomas's road at the south end.

Not quite related to apostrophes, but I feel the need to point out my favourite street name of all time (as read on a street sign): St John St (-> Saint John Street)

I've seen Doctor King Drive (Dr King Dr) in a few different towns too. One of them typographically differentiated it like "DR King Dr" though.

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

#214

Post by d1sxeyes »

rhplus wrote: post #198
d1sxeyes wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standards are just that. You can say that you can standards are the 'minimum, not the maximum', but if the standard says only alphanumeric characters are permitted (and it turns out this isn't a very well written standard, so there's a load of discussion possible on this point), an implementation that allows non-alphanumeric characters is wrong. As a thought experiment, how far beyond the 'maximum' is acceptable? Lat…

The UK includes Wales and Northern Ireland, both of which have place names that include diacritics. Whether or not Wales and Northern Ireland choose to follow this particular British Standard, I don’t know. Some examples here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/111148/do-any-uk...

Yep, that just emphasises how stupid the standard is. Others have mentioned Westward Ho![0] which is in England and contains a non-alphanumeric character.

For Wales for sure, often there are two versions of the place name, the Welsh, and an English butchering of it (see for example Pont-y-pŵl, which is spelt Pontypool in English), so I suppose it would be the English thing to do to simply pretend the Welsh/Irish spelling doesn't matter, and only use the English spelling (a little tongue-in-cheek from my side, but sadly likely the reality).

However, I suspect that whoever authored the standard was just sloppy and wrote 'alphanumeric' without giving it any careful thought.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Ho!

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

#215

Post by b112 »

iainmerrick wrote: post #179
TylerE wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 40 years I have no seen such usage in print

People say it.

You may not be wrong that people do say it, I'm sure people say pretty much anything, across this vast planet. Yet people use double negatives, when meaning the negative too. Doesn't make it right.

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

#216

Post by b112 »

Digit-Al wrote: post #206
colloydi wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The '666' portion doesn't inspire confidence either. We love apostrophes so much we have them on our supermarkets. If they're not there we add them. e.g. I'm going to Sainbury's e.g. I'm going to Tesco's ...despite the fact that it's real name is plain old Tesco.

I say Sainsbury's because the name is exactly that. I don't say Tesco's because the name, as you say, is Tesco. I would guess those who say Tesco's (and maybe Asda's) are just getting confused because of Sainsbury's.

Sounds like this Sainsbury person is responsible for spreading an apostrophe infection to Tesco.

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

#217

Post by iainmerrick »

b112 wrote: post #215
iainmerrick wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say it.

You may not be wrong that people do say it, I'm sure people say pretty much anything, across this vast planet. Yet people use double negatives, when meaning the negative too. Doesn't make it right.

I think language is defined by real-world usage, not by the logical structure that we theorise underpins it. If so, double negatives actually are right, or at least they can be, if they successfully communicate meaning.

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

#218

Post by iainmerrick »

b112 wrote: post #216
Digit-Al wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say Sainsbury's because the name is exactly that. I don't say Tesco's because the name, as you say, is Tesco. I would guess those who say Tesco's (and maybe Asda's) are just getting confused because of Sainsbury's.

Sounds like this Sainsbury person is responsible for spreading an apostrophe infection to Tesco.

Marks and Spencer are studiously looking the other way, innocent expressions on their faces.

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

#219

Post by DarkmSparks »

shadowgovt wrote: post #211
DarkmSparks wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source for it being well documented? xml suffers apostrophe issues to. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post... says As early as 2001, McDonnell’s team had found “hundreds” of bugs. A full list has never been produced, seems almost guaranteed to me it had apostrophy bugs.

Source for it being identified as a root cause of the Horizon issues. As far as I can see, there is no evidence that it was.

The evidence is they are changing the street names to stop bugs in software.

The question is what software is so hard to fix its easier to change the physical street names than fix the data entry for those street names.

Horizon seems the likely candidate, and the fix is equally stupid.

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

#220

Post by thaumasiotes »

eesmith wrote: post #203
thaumasiotes wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there something relevant about the 1800s? I said þ was an example of the written language changing to accommodate the printing press, not changing to accommodate the 1800s.

I had responded to msla's comment about "typewriters and cheap printing presses". Those didn't exist in the 1500s. þ's disappearance from English is not due to either, though the lack of þ in available type faces was certainly an issue.

But the reference to "cheap printing presses" has to be interpreted as actually being a reference to type, as you have already done with your archive.org link. The press itself cannot either support or fail to support any graphical forms; there's no difference in the press whether you're using type or block printing.

Press quality issues are things like "are the surfaces flat" / "how much pressure can the press apply" / "how many pages can we press before running into a mechanical issue".

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