Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 233 posts

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

#71

Post by shadowgovt »

Strang wrote: post #61
Turing_Machine wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The spoken and written language are not the same thing. Even if you say "Thomas's," sources disagree on whether you write "Thomas's" or "Thomas'", because the latter is more consistent with the rules for other ends-in-s words and, therefore, easier to remember.

(My personal prediction: give it 100 to 200 years and we're going to drop the trailing 's' in all these cases. "Cat'" will just be pronounced "cats" and understood to mean "an adjective indicating the noun is owned by the cat").

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

#72

Post by swasheck »

lyu07282 wrote: post #59
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 would argue if you sanitize your input you are already doing it wrong, you should parameterize queries and send the data entirely separately from code.

from a certain perspective, parameterization could be seen as sanitation, no?

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

#73

Post by shadowgovt »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #37

Makes me wonder if this was the root cause of that software glitch that wrongly sent all those 1000s of postmasters to prison.

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 bugs were dropping or duplicating data. The government should not have trusted claims of a third-party without independent auditing they controlled (and, ultimately, I think that's the takeaway that all governments should be taking from this disaster).

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

#74

Post by secondcoming »

iraqmtpizza wrote: post #32
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.

Thomas' is not grammatically correct in any version of English that I know. It's not plural. There is no special rule for that. Both the street signs you mentioned are at least grammatically coherent

You’re wrong. It’s definitely correct, but even native English speakers get the Rules of Apostrophe wrong all the time.

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

#75

Post by secondcoming »

Strang wrote: post #61
Turing_Machine wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Thomas’ is pronounced the same as Thomas’s.

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

#76

Post by grajaganDev »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #5

The best part of this article is: Ruby Wang... did not mind the changes. "To be honest with you, because I'm not from this country it doesn't matter because it's the same pronunciation," she added.

This could be from The Onion.

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

#77

Post by amluto »

shadowgovt wrote: post #69
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.

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 city field? (Is “Pacific Palisades, CA” a valid city+state? How about Van Nuys, CA or Hollywood, CA? But don’t confuse this situation with West Hollywood, CA or Beverly Hills, CA, which are actual cities.)

I wonder what address verification services expect for the “numbers in the address” when the address is 123 1/2 4th Ave #5”.

Apostrophes seem like the least of anyone’s concerns.

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

#80

Post by graypegg »

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 sign printer probably expects this format when printing signs for the government, or worse, has a contract that says the government must provide this standard format for the sign information.

So it's just a government mandated database schema... I don't think that's any better of a reasoning though lol

Post reply on HN