Britain at war over punctuation of street signs

A sample of road signs collected in London on Thursday features apostrophes. A battle is raging in towns across Britain between lovers of the English language and local councils that are eliminating the apostrophe from signs. Carl Court / Agence France-Presse

A bizarre battle is raging in towns across the United Kingdom between lovers of the English language and local councils that are culling the humble apostrophe from street signs.

The historic university city of Cambridge was the latest in a series of places this year that have made the change, which transforms names such as King's Road into Kings Road.

Cambridge was forced to backtrack after anonymous punctuation protectors mounted a guerrilla campaign, going out in the dead of night and using black marker pens to fill in the missing apostrophes.

The punctuation purge by several municipalities is apparently a response to the central government's advice aimed at helping emergency workers.

Earlier this year a teenager died of an asthma attack after an apostrophe error led to an ambulance going to the wrong address.

"National guidelines recommended not allocating new street names that required any punctuation, as, we gather, this was not well coped with by some emergency services' software," Tim Ward of Cambridge City Council told AFP.

However, he said that the council recently revised its policy once more, canceling the ban on apostrophes in street names, partly in response to a public backlash.

"Given the public interest that this awakened, we checked back on the national guidelines that we'd followed when reviewing our policy, and found that the guideline recommending against including punctuation in new street names had been dropped."

In countries such as the United States and Australia, apostrophes disappeared from street signs long ago.

But moves to do the same in the UK have aroused the ire of the guardians of the English language.