Posts by CJ Bergeron

Birmingham drops the possessive apostrophe

It's not about the apostrophe, it's about the database

Working in emergency services in the US, I can tell you that the database in question is most likely connected to a map. That map, as PCs in emergency services vehicles become more prevalent is on all of these PCs. The database is a part of that map and contains the names of the streets on the map. Our agency has used a few of the more common programs used for mapping and none of them seems to handle punctuation well, especially hyphens and apostrophes. Usually the remainder of the street names get cut off. In the earlier mentioned example of King's Rd, the name becomes King.

The real issue is not the apostrophe, it's with the software

Working in emergency services in the US I've seen this at our agency. The database in question is attached to a map and contains a list of street names for the map. As PCs in the emergency services vehicles become more common, these all have a copy of this map installed. As our agency has used a couple of the more common programs for maintaining the map, I've seen that they do not handle punctuation very well, especially apostrophes and hyphens. Usually everything after apostrophes gets cut off, to re-use an earlier example, King's Road would be cut off to show only King. I suspect the people of Alabama are running into a similar issue, eliminating the apostrophes is a work around to this.