The Saywot Blog

What can we learn from Birmingham ?

Recently the City Of Birmingham decided to cease using punctuation in it’s signage.

Within the city limits is an area known as ‘King’s Common’ signs identifying this place will now show ‘Kings Common’ this of itself may not seem important but I beg to differ.

Previously the common was probably a common owned or controlled by an actual King, hence the use of the possessive apostrophe do drop it’s use is to re-write or ignore the history of the place. It says that both names and punctuation are not important any more.

In the 1800’s the United States did the same thing for all it’s place names (except for some 5 places ,like Martha’s Vineyard) in 2005 Australia followed suit.

What I find a bit worrying is that it is yet another indication of the dumbing-down of written language what is next ? Do we allow the dropping of capitalisation, do we drop all punctuation, give up on spelling ? I can see, if the education system allows the complete and total use of ‘Functional Grammar’ and ‘Functional Spelling’, some time in the near future a time when if there will be no standard no basic rules and if there’s 10 writers in a room there’s also going to be 10 different versions of the language. Ten people just roughly translating their thoughts into something that appears, when it’s on paper, to resemble a dead language.

I think there’s also a degree of, I don’t know, maybe rudeness or arrogance. It conveys an atitude (to me) resembling “I couldn’t be arsed to apply the basic rules of written English – you work out what I mean”

And I’m one of the worst users of punctauation and quite a poor speller but I like to think I have a go at getting it right I’m keen but not a fanatic

I might join the Apostrophe Protection Society the capitalisation is correct – isn’t it ?)
http://www.bostonuk.com/linkdetail.php?id=585&cid=1208&f=Boston

The good burghers of Birmingham claim that it’s for “consistency” I think it is following a line of least resistance.

– and it’s cheaper, you save all the paint on your road signs and you don’t have to spend all that money on education

I got this from HERE

Its a catastrophe for the apostrophe in Britain

By MEERA SELVA

LONDON (AP) — On the streets of Birmingham, the queen’s English is now the queens English.

England’s second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they’re confusing and old-fashioned.

But some purists are downright possessive about the punctuation mark.

It seems that Birmingham officials have been taking a hammer to grammar for years, quietly dropping apostrophes from street signs since the 1950s. Through the decades, residents have frequently launched spirited campaigns to restore the missing punctuation to signs denoting such places as “St. Pauls Square” or “Acocks Green.”

This week, the council made it official, saying it was banning the punctuation mark from signs in a bid to end the dispute once and for all.

Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city’s transport scrutiny committee, said he decided to act after yet another interminable debate into whether “Kings Heath,” a Birmingham suburb, should be rewritten with an apostrophe.

“I had to make a final decision on this,” he said Friday. “We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do.”

Mullaney hopes to stop public campaigns to restore the apostrophe that would tell passers-by that “Kings Heath” was once owned by the monarchy.

“Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed,” he said. “More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don’t want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it.”

But grammarians say apostrophes enrich the English language.

“They are such sweet-looking things that play a crucial role in the English language,” said Marie Clair of the Plain English Society, which campaigns for the use of simple English. “It’s always worth taking the effort to understand them, instead of ignoring them.”

Mullaney claimed apostrophes confuse GPS units, including those used by emergency services. But Jenny Hodge, a spokeswoman for satellite navigation equipment manufacturer TomTom, said most users of their systems navigate through Britain’s sometime confusing streets by entering a postal code rather than a street address.

She said that if someone preferred to use a street name — with or without an apostrophe — punctuation wouldn’t be an issue. By the time the first few letters of the street were entered, a list of matching choices would pop up and the user would choose the destination.

A test by The Associated Press backed this up. In a search for London street St. Mary’s Road, the name popped up before the apostrophe had to be entered.

There is no national body responsible for regulating place names in Britain. Its main mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, which provides data for emergency services, takes its information from local governments and each one is free to decide how it uses punctuation.

“If councils decide to add or drop an apostrophe to a place name, we just update our data,” said Ordnance Survey spokesman Paul Beauchamp. “We’ve never heard of any confusion arising from their existence.”

To sticklers, a missing or misplaced apostrophe can be a major offense.

British grammarians have railed for decades against storekeepers’ signs advertising the sale of “apple’s and pear’s,” or pubs offering “chip’s and pea’s.”

In her best-selling book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” Lynne Truss recorded her fury at the title of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy “Two Weeks Notice,” insisting it should be “Two Weeks’ Notice.”

“Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended,” she wrote.

Whilst on the censorship bandwagon …

I watched an interview with a knighted English actor recently, he said that he was nominated for an Oscar (an Academy Award) and attended the appropriate venue to participate in the ceremony. Lots of people are nominated for these awards and the studios compete quite fiercely for ‘their’ films to win these awards, a win increases the financial return of the particular production. I rarely think the winning film is spectacularly superior to others and normally pay scant attention to the hype heaped upon the nominees.

This was of some interest to me because of an aside the actor made during the interview. He was referring to how ‘staged’ the ceremony was, that the whole evening was quite dull and was probably very poor quality television until …

The time came for a person to be inducted into some Hall Of Fame or some such accolade the year in question the Academy was honouring Elia Kazan
he was resonsible for arranging the cameras and organising the actors for some quite well-know films, like ‘On The Waterfront’ and ‘East Of Eden’. But – and this is a big but he was a rat !

In 1952 he was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, you may have heard of this period of US history it’s often called ‘McCarthyism’ it was the period of Anti-communism, the threat of the A-Bomb, the ‘reds under the beds’. The HUAC was supposed to be investigating the extreme right-wing groups as well, but a few of the members of the committee had a history of participating in a few of the groups they were supposed to be investigating, like the Ku Klux Klan so it was mostly a witch hunt of the left. Richard Nixon had a stint on the committee and we now know what an upright and fine supporter of democracy he turmed out to be.

Anyway this committee started to hold hearings into the commies in Hollywood from 1947 and 41 leading Hollywoodista were summoned and declared ‘Friendly Witnesses’ that is code for they volunteered to say why they were better Americans than others in the industry. I’ll give you a list of a few people who were named later – see how many names you recognise !

Kazan was a friendly witness and he named names. Many of those people he accused of being possessed of left-wing views never worked in the film industry again, others emigrated and tried to re-establish their careers overseas. He took the view that it was better that a few others suffer a little bit rather than he suffer a lot.

The old dude was lead onto the stage by De Niro and Scorsese, the English knight said that it looked like he was being led to the front of a firing squad. A large percentage of the audience in the theatre refused to stand or applaud this old guy. The cameras broadcasting the event didn’t pan across the crowd, they didn’t record the tumultuous cheering (there wasn’t any). He said it made for very poor TV but was a great piece of live theatre

What has this got to do with censorship ?

OK, during periods of heightened uncertainty Governments become nervous, if you want to stay in office you want to present yourself as a source of stability and safety. The kind of Government that will protect you from the myriad menaces and threats from all sides. You want to be the guys that people turn to when they’re threatened by — well you can put in here anything that’s currently causing you some concern, try ‘terrorism, or global financial crisis’ maybe the ‘environmental degradation’ – whatever. Censorship is being touted as a way of halting the decline of the morals of young people, The dirty beggars are using the internet to watch porn – the swine !.

What the Social Democratic Government in Australia wants me to believe is that adding a bunch of expensive hardware at every Internet Service Provider and applying a bunch of filters to prevent anyone from accessing web-sites that may have any pornographic content. They say this is to prevent kids from being damaged by this smut. (see above and add kiddy porn to the list of growing threats that the Government will need to protect us from in order to maintain moral hygeine and get themselves re-elected – add it after Terrorism)

There is a catch to this well-meaning proposal, it won’t work.

Sure by slowing the internet down to allow every piece of data to be examined and either permitted or denied further transport it will change the method people who might like to have a look at a bit of hard core porno from time to time will use to visit the sites that will have the appropriate data to satisfy them after it has been downloaded onto their screens in the privacy of their own homes. It won’t stop a dedicated porn-viewer, it’ll just change how they do it.

But this proposal is all about the kiddies, i must now ask, how many kids want to view kiddy-pron ? I’ll go out on a limb and have a guess at — very few. So whatever the slowing-down of the internet is supposed to do to protect kids from being traumatised by kiddy-smut it will be an expensive waste of bandwidth and money that could be better spent on more worthwhile projects.

Thus far we have web-sites that have been identified as serving stuff that has been identified by another government bodyas containing illegal or ‘inappropriate’ material. The number of sites will sky-rocket, they’re freakin’ money spinners after all. They will change names and change addresses faster that you can blink. – none stopped, just a few inconvenienced and not for that long.

We haven’t even had a bit of a look at the other protocols on the internet. You know the stuff like FTP and VPN and setting up proxies, Then there is encryption of the packets of data. If you want to examine these locked bits you will have to slow the already miserable broadband in Australia down to dial-up speed and do a heap of deep-packet inspection. – So much for becoming an even cleverer country.

Rudd and the Ruddettes have said they want to protect children by filtering internet content before it’s allowed to hit the monitors in our homes. Kids don’t view the type of material that paedophiles pass amongst themselves and there’s quite some number of alternative methods of broadcasting and transferring this illegal material. It’s going to be expensive and ineffective and Australia will be a world leader in the censorship stakes

But what the current lot will need to realise is that eventually they will lose office, they will be voted out and will be guilty of having installed a system that can limit all internet content. Despite their protestations to the contrary they are censoring and they have limited free speech. When they say that they’re not really censoring I’m reminded of a joke about a guy sitting alone in a train carriage, a pretty girl gets in with him, he looks up and asks her if she’d sleep with him for $2000, she looks up, pauses, and says ‘Yes’. he then asks her if she would sleep with him for $20 she says”Of course not ! – what do you take me for ?” he replies’ we’ve already decided what you are, now we’re haggling over the price’

A bit of censorship is still censorship

Oh, before I forget. Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie

you really should read about this dark period of American history