I Dont Think This Will Work

This was an article in yesterdays Winnipeg Free Press

"British citys law shant, cant, wont allow apostrophes
By: Meera Selva
On the streets of Birmingham, the Queen's English is now the Queens English.
England's second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they're confusing and old-fashioned.
But some purists are downright possessive about the punctuation mark.
It seems that Birmingham officials have been taking a hammer to grammar for years, quietly dropping apostrophes from street signs since the 1950s. Through the decades, residents have frequently launched spirited campaigns to restore the missing punctuation to signs denoting such places as "St. Pauls Square" or "Acocks Green."
This week, the council made it official, saying it was banning the punctuation mark from signs in a bid to end the dispute once and for all.
Coun. Martin Mullaney, who heads the city's transport scrutiny committee, said he decided to act after yet another interminable debate into whether "Kings Heath," a suburb, should be rewritten with an apostrophe.
"I had to make a final decision on this," he said Friday. "We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do."
Mullaney hopes to stop public campaigns to restore the apostrophe that would tell passersby that "Kings Heath" was once owned by the monarchy.
"Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed," he said. "More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to have an A-level (high-school diploma) in English to find it."
But grammarians say apostrophes enrich the English language.
"They are such sweet-looking things that play a crucial role in the English language," said Marie Clair of the Plain English Society, which campaigns for the use of simple English. "It's always worth taking the effort to understand them, instead of ignoring them."
Mullaney claimed apostrophes confuse GPS units, including those used by emergency services. But Jenny Hodge, a spokeswoman for satellite navigation equipment manufacturer TomTom, said most users of their systems navigate through Britain's streets by entering postal codes rather than addresses.
She said that if someone preferred to use a street name -- with or without an apostrophe -- punctuation wouldn't be an issue. By the time the first few letters of the street were entered, a list of matching choices would pop up and the user would choose the destination.
British grammarians have railed for decades against' signs advertising the sale of "apple's and pear's." In her bestselling book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss recorded her fury at the title of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy Two Weeks Notice, insisting it should be "Two Weeks' Notice."
"Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended," she wrote."