The hotel was named the Westward Ho!-tel
nooo!
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That might last until the next database refresh. It took my newly created postcode over a year to be recognised on a variety of official addressing systems. In the meantime I had to give the address of the house opposite.
You’r mile’age may var’y
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I did web dev in the early 2000’s and my boss’s boss was a guy called O’Brien. Pretty good incentive to handle punctuation in an inclusive and SQL safe manner. This issue is just lazy solutioning.
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The most surprising road sign punctuation that I’ve seen was on a road trip through British Columbia:
(Yes, the “7” is intentional.)
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And not one drop of bile expended on the RY WA kerning on the new sign?
Outrageous.
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The USA GNIS rules also discourage apostrophes.
- Is the possessive apostrophe “s”, such as in Pike’s Peak, allowed in the GNIS?
Since its inception in 1890, the BGN has discouraged the use of the possessive form—the possessive apostrophe and the “s”. Only five BGN decisions have allowed the apostrophe for natural features. These are: 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.
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All of that. I mean… The very first time someone works with a field containing arbitrary text, it’s going to go boom on the first apostrophe.
I guess someone’s nephew got the job. 
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The stop after “St” is a moot point - Many style guides say not to use them with contractions. That’s how I was instructed too.
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Since that style guide was from the University of Oxford, does that make the stop in the middle of “St. Mary’s Walk” a non-Oxford period?
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There should be a version along the lines of “falsehoods that MBAs procuring Enterprise Resource Management systems in 1997 believe in”
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Beat me to it. In the UK it is correct to abbreviate Mister as Mr without the dot. Makes sense in that I see a dot as truncating the word, and the “t” in Saint and “r” in Mister are the ends of the word. (I’m an editor, I think about things like that.)
I see your exclamation mark and raise you:
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Joke’s on you… your date is waiting in St. James’s Park
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I don’t have any familiarity with the domain of geoinformation, but knowing how these things historically worked in terms of web standards, I’d hazard a guess that while the standard is great and describes how things ought to be entered and consumed, a kind of folk standard grew up around the standard when the data was consumed by a variety of software with varying degrees of adherence to the standard in presenting/searching/etc. Since some software that consumed the data didn’t handle punctuation well, despite the onus properly being on the badly written software to better align with the spec, a set of “folk rules” started to grow about how to manage data so it is maximally compatible with all the shitty software out there. Kind of similar to how we used to code websites around all the oddities in Internet Explorer, despite the existence of web standards.
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It’s not as if ʔ is common on keyboards, so speakers of various Indigenous languages standardized on 7 or ?. Crow speakers prefer ‘?’, Squamish speakers prefer 7.
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actually, i think it was macarthur park. with the cake in the rain…
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There were so many products that I couldn’t order in the early days of online shopping because they wouldn’t accept that my PO Box number had a letter in it, and also wouldn’t accept “General Delivery.”
(And we were too rural for home delivery, those were the only two addresses I had.)
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