Apostrophes on roadsigns banned!

After a tense grammatical debate Birmingham City Council has decreed that possessive apostrophes shall no longer appear on its street signs...

Mr Mullaney argued that since the monarchy no longer owned Kings Heath, or Kings Norton, and since the Acock family no longer owned Acocks Green, the punctuation marks that once appeared in those names were now redundant. Defenders of the apostrophe in Birmingham responded with angry question marks. Much like the names on their street signs, some residents appeared to be possessive. They demanded the return of their apostrophes...

For their part, the Plain English Society and the Plain Language Commission both said there was no rule in Britain with regard to possessive apostrophes in place names.

The US dropped such punctuation in 1890 when the US Board of Geographic Names removed the apostrophe from its database. Only five exceptions have ever been made, including Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in 1933. Australia followed suit in 2001 for the sake of consistency in the databases used by the emergency services, said Mr Mullaney. “It would be tragic if the ambulance couldn’t find your street if you forgot to use the possessive apostrophe.”

Above all, there was the cost of reintroducing the marks. If the council gave one road an apostrophe, residents on countless others would want one. “The cost would be astronomical,” he said.

(all text and image credit to The Times)

Update: I posted the above back in January. Now the Daily Mail is reporting that a man has been taking it upon himself to replace the apostrophes on the signs. "But he was immediately accused of being a vandal by one neighbour, and his amendments have been scratched off by others who apparently prefer the wrong version."