North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

A local authority has announced it will ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems.

What type of boring dystopia are we living in? Also, is this to make Bobby Tables life harder?

A spokesperson added: “All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666.

“This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (e.g. apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems.”

I appreciate that the standard’s prefix is BS, though.

(original bbc article)