Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names
- Reference: 1715066947
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/05/07/north_yorkshire_council_blames_databases/
- Source link:
North Yorkshire Council recently decided to eliminate apostrophes from street names, because they and other punctuation marks simply don't get along well with geographical databases, apparently.
This did not go over well.
[1]
In the town of Harrogate, for example, a new sign for St Mary's Walk that reads "St Marys Walk" has been seen as a, er, sign of the general decay of the modern age. Speaking to the BBC, St Marys Walk folk [2]urged the council to restore the apostrophe lest "everything go downhill."
[3]
[4]
"I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation," railed one resident. The offending sign has had its apostrophe restored – not by the council, but by an enterprising grammarian with a black marker.
Apostrophes discouraged
This argument over grammar may be raging in the UK, but over in the United States, the thorny issue of punctuated place names was tackled more than a century ago with the the inception of the Board of Geographic Names.
Implemented in 1890, the BGN's Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) " [5]discourages " the use of the possessive apostrophe in place names, with only five exceptions granted since enforcement began: Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; Ike's Point, New Jersey; John E's Pond, Rhode Island; Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Arizona; and Clark's Mountain, Oregon.
While the GNIS doesn't define road names (those are governed at the state level) the precedent it set has generally been followed, with many rules in place throughout the US that discourage or ban the use of apostrophes in geographical place names – including roads.
[6]
Speaking to the BBC, the English council argued that UK-wide policy, similarly, was behind the change.
"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," a council spokesperson explained, referring to [7]this red tape .
"This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems," the spokesperson added.
[8]Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments
[9]Footie ballsup: Petition kicks off to fix 'geometrically impossible' street signs
[10]Half of Brits abuse apostrophe's
[11]Birmingham drops the possessive apostrophe
And while the spokesperson is correct that [12]some jurisdictions had taken similar measures, it's important to note that [13]others that tried to ditch this kind of punctuation changed course after similar public backlash.
Meanwhile, a review of BS7666 found little mention of the topic – though we did find one mention in [14]Chapter 5.4.4.1 [PDF] of part two of the [15]combined guidelines .
[16]
"Abbreviations and punctuation should not be used," the rule states, "unless they appear in the designated name, e.g. 'Dr Newton's Way'." St Mary ought to have her walk, then, no?
That wording in the rule makes it seem an awful lot like there's no restriction on punctuation in BS7666. We've reached out to North Yorkshire Council to see about that justification – and whether it's just post-hoc justification for an aesthetic choice – and haven't heard back.
We have to wonder: What are they worried about? Someone proposing a new avenue called Sir Bobby');DROP TABLE payroll;--? ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Zjn7vJQZv8RqBP@7wxqpwgAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-68942321
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zjn7vJQZv8RqBP@7wxqpwgAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[5] https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/what-geographic-names-information-system-gnis#12
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zjn7vJQZv8RqBP@7wxqpwgAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.agi.org.uk/bs-7666-guidelines/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/11/linus_torvalds_in_sweary_rant_about_punctuation_in_kernel_comments/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2017/10/10/petition_kicks_off_to_correct_geometrically_impossible_football_street_signs/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/11/apostrophe_abuse/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2009/01/30/brum_apostrophe_shocker/
[12] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-21795179
[13] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/06/council-reverses-ban-on-apostrophes
[14] https://www.agi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BS7666GuidelinesSections5-6.pdf
[15] https://www.agi.org.uk/bs-7666-guidelines/
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zjn7vJQZv8RqBP@7wxqpwgAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I think - as the [1]very last sentence in the article alluded - the point is that, particularly these days there should be no such limitations.
Oh, and [2]good choice for the image illustrating the article , by the way. Personally I prefer the one in Harrogate to the one in York.
M.
[1] https://xkcd.com/327/
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/05/07/shutterstock_bettys_tea_room.jpg
Database vs sign
The text on a sign does not have to be the same as an entry in a geographical database - similar to how a database of people can have entries for "Legal name" and "Known as"!
Tail wags dog
The irony here is that the standard attempts to AVOID the name being altered. If only it stated ‘do not change the name, don’t add or remove contractions, don’t add or remove punctuation, don’t change the name by abbreviation.’ I’ll see if I can get the standard amended…
Maybe SAP could sell West Yorkshire Council a version with sensible input validation that isn’t just [A-Za-z]. I doubt the database is a csv file…. Although maybe that’s optimistic…
I think this sort of thing is egregious as it is casual cultural vandalism.
Re: Tail wags dog
sensible input validation that isn’t just [A-Za-z]
I once had to work with an "artist" who didn't get this. His idea was to have a wall of moving message-board signs (96 of them), each one of which would show the title of an article from Wikipedia, chosen by following links on a "seed" article, and then links within the links, and so on.
Those moving message boards had character limitations of course so the artist sanitised the text sent to the boards (turns out that they had more characters than he thought, and that they also had a reasonably good in-built "translation" system so he could probably have got away with not bothering) but the real mistake he made was to store the sanitised page title as the link which he would next feed into his Wikipedia crawler instead of the actual URL. In many cases, this worked, but in more cases than you might imagine, even on English Wikipedia, this failed and his crawler ended up on disambiguation pages or search pages instead of back at the original page.
It was such a simple mistake - and I spotted it pretty much immediately I started looking at his code - but he utterly refused to acknowledge it and insisted until the "artwork" was dismantled that there must be a bug with Wikipedia, or a subtle bug in link handling by [1]Processing and of course, as merely the lackey tasked with plugging the thing in and making sure it didn't burn the place down (and never having written anything in Processing before, though I was beginning to tinker with Arduino), my opinion was near worthless.
There were other problems with the artwork which I was allowed to look at. The boards were run from a single multi-drop RS485 line but instead of wiring it as a "bus" with "drops", which is what RS485 expects, it had been wired (effectively) "star", which was fine with a dozen or so boards attached, but once scaled up to the full number just stopped working. Rather than spending a week re-making that cable I think (if I remember correctly - it's well over 10 years ago now) that I solved that particular problem by using an RS485 splitter and being very careful about terminations.
M.
[1] https://processing.org/
Re: Tail wags dog
... and don't get me started on user names and passwords in the ancient SAP system a place I used to work at used. There were some wird restrictions.
Re: Tail wags dog
I'm concerned that if they remove hyphens too, what would happen to York's 'Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate'?
Re: Tail wags dog
"Maybe SAP could sell West Yorkshire Council a version with sensible input validation"
We have enough problems here in West Yorkshire and especially in Kirklees without SAP or new versions thereof and it wouldn't make any difference to the North Yorkshire anyway.
Re: Tail wags dog
@JamesTGrant
Did you read the article? It is about the NORTH Yorkshire Council.
As someone who lives in the former W.R.C.C. I am unaware of a West Yorkshire Council. That was abolished decades ago and now I have to put up with being governed by the Bradford Metropolitan District Council..Jumped up fucking pricks who spend taxpayers money into oblivion. And don't get me started on that useless pile of shit that call themselves Keighley council.
Et tu, Brute?
Speaking to the BBC, St Marys Walk folk urged the council to restore the apostrophe lest "everything go downhill."
So, is this an accidental removal of the apostrophe by El Reg or are you secretly siding with North Yorkshire Council?
Re: Et tu, Brute?
Aint that the streets new name
dang I almost typed in a questionmark punctuation is discouraged
BS7666
From Section 1, Annex D:
Standard data types used in BS 7666
CharacterString: a sequence of alphanumeric characters
Integer: a whole number
Date: a date according to BS ISO 8601, in the form YYYYMMDD or YYYY-MM-DD
... and that's it, that's the only types of data it allows. Which seems kinda limiting, from our perspective, but it could be considered enough to ban apostrophes. As well as hyphens, colons, brackets etc.
Of course, a really strict reading could also be interpreted as prohibiting spaces. So it should be "StMarysWalk". I wonder how that would go down with NorthYorkshire council?
Re: BS7666
CharacterString: a sequence of alphanumeric characters
I quickly scanned BS 7666 and could not see a definition of 'alphanumeric'. But we live in modern times so I would hope that alphabetic would include everything that Unicode says is a letter.
I am sorely tempted to persuade my local council to name a new street after some foreign person, eg François Mitterrand to see how they cope with ç. My next would be, perhaps, some Indian or Chinese person.
Re: BS7666
You don't even need to go that far. Irish names (O'Neill (First Minister of NI Assembly), O'Leary, O'Briain to name a small few).They took our land, they took our lives, they'll never take our puncuation!
I work with a standard developed in the 1960s; it too doesn't allow punctuation, but it is nearing 60 years old. On the rare occasion I stray into modernity, string values have punctuation, escapted if necessary.
Re: BS7666
Ah, yes. The Indian S/W house that replaced their programmers every few months as their visas expired and we, on the receiving end, would be sent XML broken by an apostrophised Irish name because the new guy had fixed the bit of code he didn't understand and must therefore have been wrong.
Re: BS7666
>> CharacterString: a sequence of alphanumeric characters
> to ban apostrophes. As well as hyphens, colons, brackets etc.
SPACES!
That definition strictly read bans SPACES!
(Ok, not the first person to point this out, but - SPACES! And it isn't even as if the N. Yorks folk speak *that* fast)
I've seen worse
In Rochester there was a road called simply "The Delce" and signed to that effect. Against strong local opposition the council changed it to "Delce Road".
Re: I've seen worse
Curse this sans-serif font - I read that as "De ice", i.e. the process of removing frozen water. And wondered what on Earth the back story was for that one!
Not too far from me is the delightfully-named "Odge Gribble Lane". Named after a noteworthy local resident, but it never fails to bring a smile to my face.
Re: I've seen worse
A mate had "Trenmore Road" (street? dunno) on his bike commute, which we jokingly referred to as "train more!" road.
Re: I've seen worse
Up Oakworth road in my town there is a street called Fanny Street. If our fucking useless councillors found out about it, imagine the furore that would happen!!!
Re: I've seen worse
Brighton has a steet with a very amusing yet also punny name...Bartholomews
Re: I've seen worse
I live on a street with an umlaut in the name. Admittedly, it's in Germany, so I suppose there's some sort of excuse for it... but I am a Yorkshireman, and I can assure that my late father would have been writing rude (though very polite) letters to the council were he still a a position to do so.
St[.] Mary's Walk
The difficulty with the council's argument, which seems to revolve around correctly identifying a street in an emergency, is that the equivalence between "St" and "Saint" is a lot harder to allow for in a text search than simply disregarding punctuation marks.
In any case, the definitive source of wisdom regarding apostrophes is well known to lie not with BS7666 but with greengrocer's.
Re: St[.] Mary's Walk
> which seems to revolve around correctly identifying a street in an emergency
That would suggest the character set limit is as defined by the established phonetic alphabet and morse code….
Personally don’t see the problem (no apostrophes), given what we are talking about is signpost English.
Re: St[.] Mary's Walk
I've just been looking at some places I know and all I can see is glorious consistent inconsistency! In Manchester St Werburgh's Road is spelled on maps and the tram stop with the apostrophe. But the street signs don't use it. The next road, St Brannocks – also a Saxon "saint" – is blissfully ignorant of apostrophes in all forms!
I can understand not using apostrophes in street signs that are all in capitals: it's easy to overlook them and there are similar rules for diacritics in other languages: French road signs don't have accents, for example; German road signs retain the umlauts but infuriatingly use different sized fonts, rather than abbreviations with apostrophes, for long names. Given the time you have to read road signs, consistency of forms is key for quick reading, which is why many Germans try and learn the route they're planning before the set off.
Then we can look at the history of the apostrophe: it wasn't used with the genitive to denote possession rather than the plural until fairly recently. The other Germanic languages that use the s-suffix for the genitive struggle with the apostrophe, though they have few words that use "s" for the plural so that there are few chances of confusion, say, between "Stefans" and "Stefans"… Though this doesn't make them immune from some other fairly odd decisions: Swedish uses the colon instead of the apostrophe in abbreviations so that "TV's" (or more simply "TVs") is written as "TV:s".
Perhaps Councils could adopt a different naming practice: "The walk that honours Saint Mary" fixes both the missing period after her title AND dodges the possessive term.
...or they could simply stop dumbing down our native language.
"these characters have specific meanings in computer systems"
What is it with computer programs that can't figure out that they're working with data, not with code ?
I've known the Bobby Tables joke for ages now and I still can't understand how that happens. If I type DROP TABLE USERLIST here, El Reg is not suddenly going to find that table gone. This is data, not code.
Re: "these characters have specific meanings in computer systems"
It would have to be '); DROP TABLE USERLIST
But even that wouldn't work, of course, because El Reg isn't that stupid. (And even if it were, and even if a table by that name does exist, I'm pretty sure it would have dependencies that would cause the command to fail anyway.) But is anyone, any more? I mean, I know that sort of thing used to happen back in the earlies, but surely we've all outgrown that stage by now? Haven't we?
Re: "these characters have specific meanings in computer systems"
'Twas elsewhere on this site - the story about Nokia, in fact - that I read earlier today a comment about how early Android versions would interpret typed text as system commands. The example given was that typing "reboot" in a note or contact name would, indeed, reboot the phone.
So confusion between data and code is definitely not a solved problem. One has to imagine that the sort of programmer that would make that mistake would also stick their socks up their nose and wear their shoes on their hands whilst licking the walls and dribbling, but...
Re: "these characters have specific meanings in computer systems"
Pretty sure I worked with that guy on wealth management software in a Fortune 500 company. I'm sure local authorities have much higher standards, though.
This road sign always used to amuse me: [1]Bronte Parsonagë . These days they've lost the diaeresis on Brontë.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@53.8727407,-1.8954745,3a,16.4y,290.94h,86.34t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sVXnGiGn8b7ugwU54ODGDPg!2e0!5s20141001T000000!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu
By eck!
Good catch. Sir!
Re: By eck!
Indeed. That's scaling the wuthëring hëights of ridiculousness.
Re: By eck!
> wuthëring hëights
They were a great metal band, but make sure you start with the third album, with that great ballad about the Shadows hiking in Dorset, "Walkin' on the heath, Cliff"
[1]Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses
[1] https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
And even that list is outdated now. Ireland (Republic Of) now has postcodes, they refer to a single building.
stand 'ard
> whether it's just post-hoc justification for an aesthetic choice
The lovely thing about standards is that if you don't like one, just choose another. If there arent [sic] any that take your fancy, just create your own.
Re: stand 'ard
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from, —Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Re: stand 'ard
[1]ObXKCD
[1] https://xkcd.com/927/
"Reached out to"!
You must have bloody long arms then.
But they were nothing but apostrophes
Blondes brunettes and redheads
Put the hammer down
To pound a cold chisel
Through my heart
But they were nothing but apostrophes
Oh baby
This one's from the heart
https://genius.com/Tom-waits-this-ones-from-the-heart-lyrics
Input validation
Not a punctuation thing but I have to phone a building society later because their website insists that I enter the first, third and twelfth character of my password.
The acceptability criteria for passwords on their site includes that it must be between eight and twelve characters long. Mine is currently eight.
Re: Input validation
I'd be more worried that it sounds like they're storing your password in plain text if they can check specific characters.
Re: Input validation
It's ok, he doesn't really mean "password" in the way we mean it (but I'm willing to bet that the website calls it that!).
If you really haven't come across this system yet, is a hang over from moving to the web from 'phone banking, where you would (still do) have to tell the person a subset of the "secret phrase" so that the phone operator couldn't learn it all and type it in when they aren't in a recorded call with you.
Think of it as 8 to 12 totally independent, but very short, passwords, (hopefully!) stored accordingly.
Re: Input validation
It should accept a null value for the twelfth character, however, to force the input checker to recognise you have entered a digit in each field, you might have to enter a character and then delete it.
I have a slightly different problem, just accidentally discovered the limit to one financial site, it accepts the setting of a 14 character password, but only actually stores and uses the first 12 characters…
Total BS
I suggest they check out the definition of PAF (postcode address format) which what the UK Post Office uses for address matching. Apostrophe is allowed, if their address matching software can’t handle it, it’s a bug. If they can’t work out how to store in a database it is incompetence.
North Yorkshire is in no position to complain about meaningless names, given that the county extends as far south as Selby.
BGN's Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)
There’s no hope for us if we start taking grammar advice from the Americans.
"I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation," railed one resident.
Makes me think they walk past foodbanks and don't bat an eye lid at them.
Justification for an aesthetic choice? I assumed it was down to limitations of the underlying database.