Tuesday, February 03, 2009

The Queens English? Ha!

I used to believe that poor grammar and punctuation (along with lame justifications thereof) was chiefly the domain of us Americans, but this article is making me rethink that assumption. There might be some valid reasons to remove apostrophes from signs, but "confusing and old-fashioned" aren't among them. And one shouldn't need an A-level in English to understand a simple street sign!

In the town of Manhattan, Kansas, where I grew up, there's a street that had three different names among at least seven signs: Seth Child Road, Seth Childs Road, Seth Child's Road. This was the case fifteen years ago, anyway; I don't know if they've settled on something since. The inconsistency was a little annoying, but I wouldn't have taken it as an argument to remove all apostrophes from every sign. If anything, "Seth Childs Road" makes the least amount of sense among the three.

I'm with Lynne Truss on this one. It's a weak attempt to hide ignorance by claiming some higher purpose.

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