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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

#61

Post by Strang »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #54
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some writers" say that the French Foreign Legion has been deployed to the front lines in Ukraine too. We must take this very seriously, then! Some writers write things like Four Fat Harvard Girls Lose Book Bag too. They use sentence fragments. They try to save ink by doing weird shit. Professional Buzzfeed writers write AF (yes, in caps) to mean as fuck. The Atlantic used the words electroöptical and rôles in 1940.…

> it's not even accepted colloquially in spoken English How the hell would you hear the apostrophe in "spoken English"?

That's exactly his point. You don't hear the apostrophe but you do hear the "s," meaning that Thomas and Thomas' cannot be distinguished. And so Thomas's must be used instead.

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

#62

Post by filmor »

dark-star wrote: post #31
ginko wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem with apostrophes is also that there's two characters for it. ' and ’

My keyboard has at least 3 already: ` ´ and ' ... I guess there are lots more in other languages...

The first two are accents, and to me it always looks extremely unprofessional when they are abused as apostrophes.

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

#64

Post by rjh29 »

iraqmtpizza wrote: post #53
lioeters wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confidently wrong. > Some writers and editors add ’s to every proper noun, be it Hastings’s or Jones’s. There also are a few who add only an apostrophe to all nouns ending in s. > ..One method, common in newspapers and magazines, is to add an apostrophe plus s (’s) to common nouns ending in s, but only a stand-alone apostrophe to proper nouns ending in s. > Examples: the class’s hours; Mr. Jones’ golf clubs; The canv…

"Some writers" say that the French Foreign Legion has been deployed to the front lines in Ukraine too. We must take this very seriously, then! Some writers write things like Four Fat Harvard Girls Lose Book Bag too. They use sentence fragments. They try to save ink by doing weird shit. Professional Buzzfeed writers write AF (yes, in caps) to mean as fuck. The Atlantic used the words electroöptical and rôles in 1940.…

Now you've provided an explanation I can see you're right (but downvoted). We would say Thomas-es in the possessive so it's written Thomas's.

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

#65

Post by calibas »

You can print apostrophes on a street sign without any database issues because a street sign doesn't interface directly with a database. At least not yet...

All the technical issues here have already been solved a hundred times, there's plenty of other options. It's a little worrying that we're eliminating punctuation in real life because of issues with integrating with geographical databases.

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

#68

Post by shadowgovt »

iraqmtpizza wrote: post #53
lioeters wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confidently wrong. > Some writers and editors add ’s to every proper noun, be it Hastings’s or Jones’s. There also are a few who add only an apostrophe to all nouns ending in s. > ..One method, common in newspapers and magazines, is to add an apostrophe plus s (’s) to common nouns ending in s, but only a stand-alone apostrophe to proper nouns ending in s. > Examples: the class’s hours; Mr. Jones’ golf clubs; The canv…

"Some writers" say that the French Foreign Legion has been deployed to the front lines in Ukraine too. We must take this very seriously, then! Some writers write things like Four Fat Harvard Girls Lose Book Bag too. They use sentence fragments. They try to save ink by doing weird shit. Professional Buzzfeed writers write AF (yes, in caps) to mean as fuck. The Atlantic used the words electroöptical and rôles in 1940.…

Rules, especially in English, are not grounded in any agreed-upon authority and never have been, tracing all the way back to Chaucer more-or-less codifying the written form of the language by simply writing one story that then became the most popular English printed work for a generation.

Try not to lean too hard on how other people use the language just because it ain't how you use it. Makes you look outta touch with the way folks are playin' around with one of our shared human comms protocols, neh?

> but hn rate limits

Not in general. Only if you've proven yourself to be a poster for whom the mods think that rate-limiting you improves the health of the discourse 'round these parts.

Being someone who is also rate-limited. ;)

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

#69

Post by shadowgovt »

charles_f wrote: post #66

Looks like a much easier solution than having a couple people learn how to escape a string and prepare a sql statement.

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.

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

#70

Post by secondcoming »

ginko wrote: post #15
espinielli wrote: post #8

As if database were not able to del with apostrophes or other special characters... Yes you have to sanitize your queries, but you have to do it anyway. Client applications will of course have to be smarter

I think part of the problem with apostrophes is also that there's two characters for it. ' and ’

There’s not though. My iPad gives this one, but that’s probably the fault of Apple thinking they know better.
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