Britain at war over punctuation of street signs

'Commas will be next'

Kathy Salaman, director of The Good Grammar Company, a Cambridge-based organization that provides training to companies, said the issue was not one of pedantry but of upholding wider standards.

"If they take our apostrophes, commas will be next," she said.

"In Britain the tendency is now that if something is too difficult, let's get rid of it. Why are we trying to improve literacy when actually in real life people say it doesn't really matter?"

Salaman defended the word-warriors who had restored punctuation to street signs.

"If the apostrophe needs to be there, I don't think it's vandalism because I would say the language is being vandalized," she said.

While Cambridge may have rescinded its apostrophe apocalypse, national authorities said that they still prefer street signs without punctuation.

GeoPlace, the organization that oversees the production and maintenance of Britain's national address and street gazetteers, said the final decision rests with local councils.

"However, the Data Entry Conventions documentation does state that GeoPlace would prefer not to receive data (including street names) with punctuation," it said in a statement, citing machine readability and usability by emergency services as the reasons.

Dozens of local councils around the country are still waging war on the apostrophe, campaigners say.

"It's serious," said John Richard, founder and chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

"I don't know why their computers couldn't be trained to recognize an apostrophe."

He also lamented a decline in general standards.

"I think people are very lazy or very ignorant and the language is declining," he said.

"It is setting a very bad example because teachers are teaching our children punctuation and then they see road signs with apostrophes removed."

Several councils have consulted the Plain English Campaign, an independent group that has fought for clearer use of the language for more than three decades, to see what they think.

Tony Maher, the group's general manager, said apostrophes were a problem for many people.

"Personally, I would leave the street names as they are in the hope that our children learn how to use apostrophes correctly."

He said he still sees shops with "greengrocers' apostrophes" emblazoned incorrectly in their windows, such as "Apple's 20p", "Orange's 25p" and "Sock's", he said.

"I think it is one argument that will continue for many years to come," he said.