Poor grammar is likely to make me apo-plectic with rage

WHATS it matter if we dont have apostrophes Im sure wed get by and youd understand what Im getting at unless your old fashioned and think punctuation and all that mallarkeys important

Dashes and squiggles and flying comma’s lets get rid of them all and capital letters and dont get me started on hyphen’s there such a pain…

Enough! Thats – sorry, that’s – left me feeling dirty. But it’s a taste of things to come if we ignore the barbarians at the gates of Punctuation Paradise.

News of another outrage comes from North Yorkshire and, once again, it’s the not-so-humble apostrophe under fire.

The council there has decreed that all new street signs that should have an apostrophe won’t, for reasons I will come to later because to delay now would probably result in my computer screen being so covered with the spittle of rage that I’d never finish this piece.

The assault is under way in the genteel town of Harrogate, where a sign for St Mary’s Walk has been replaced by one for St Marys Walk. Some of the natives are revolting.

One has even drawn in their own apostrophe, prompting me to check my stock of felt-tip pens in case the philistines reach my neighbourhood.

“I walk past the sign every day and it just riles my blood,” said the local postie, who spent years as a teacher instructing children in the correct use of punctuation and grammar, only for the council to decide they’re not important.

A local resident fumed: “If we start losing things like that, then everything goes downhill, doesn’t it?”

Perhaps not quite. But these things matter to some of us, even if others think they’re irrelevant.

That’s the thing about punctuation: leaving it out doesn’t affect you if you don’t “get it”. But if you do, it can make you stumble when reading a phrase or sentence, or even change the meaning.

I saw a notice online this week, headed “Women and girls touch rugby” and wondered: ‘do they?’ An apostrophe would have made it clear that it was their game.

If you were to read for example, that “her brothers children go to the same school” would you know she had one brother or more? As for the hyphen, which is also being dumped as unfashionable, are “10 minute speeches” those that last 10 minutes, or 10 very short ones?

North Yorkshire council says it has decided to eliminate the apostrophe, in line with many local authorities across the country. And the reason? Computers can’t cope.

Apparently “street names and addresses stored in the database must meet the standards set out in BS7666 and ‘special characters’ like apostrophes can cause problems with database searches”.

I’ll give them BS! What they’re saying is that a computer program – an invention of mankind, incidentally – cannot handle punctuation. Then teach it! Otherwise, this sort of thing will develop until our whole lives are run by machines.

Oh, wait a minute…