Word Nerds Unite

I was absolutely appalled to read about the recent decision of officials in Birmingham, England’s second-largest city, to eliminate all apostrophes from the city’s street signs, calling the marks ”confusing and old-fashioned.” 

I would be annoyed but considerably less offended if they said they were eliminating the apostrophes because they were too expensive to produce and too hard to see from the street level anyhow, but the claim that these critical punctuation marks “confuse people” and “are not needed” is ludicrous.

What’s worse, the British grammarians tapped to provide a challenging view in the article gave equally low credit to the general public. Marie Clair of the Plain English Society chimes in, “It’s always worth taking the effort to understand [apostrophes], instead of ignoring them.” 

If we are beyond the third grade, do we really need to “take the effort” to comprehend the most basic applications of the apostrophe required for use on street signs? There are no sentences there, no complex usage required. Although I don’t deny that a good percentage of the public misuses punctuation regularly, hence the continued usefulness of proofreaders, I still like to believe that most people can understand the difference between kings and king’s.