Missed the Point: Birmingham City Council give in to the stupidity of its people
Spelling and grammar in Britain has reached an appalling state; words are being misspelled all over the place, there is a flagrant disregard for the wonder of punctuation, while text message nonsense abbreviations have somehow become commonplace.
However, the recent decision by Birmingham City Council to remove the humble apostrophe from each of the city’s street signs (at an estimated cost of 50 million Havers), is truly the final straw.
It beggars belief that there are people in positions of power in Nigel’s country that can encourage such outrageous abuse of Nigel’s beautiful language.
However, it appears that it is not only spelling and grammar that people have trouble with. A recent report by the Haverian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Language estimated that 50% of the UK population mispronounce the word “scone”, while entire continents seem unable to spell such simple words as “colour”, or understand the difference between a question mark and a full stop in spoken language.
This madness must end.
As a starting point to recovering standards, the NHA will therefore impose strict controls on spelling and grammar, to include compulsory weekly spelling tests for all members of the population, punctuation patrols to safeguard signs and posters, tough punishments for anyone who fails to understand when and when not to use apostrophe’s, and execution for anyone found supporting the substitution of numerals for words. Of course, this would mean bad news for the staff of Phones4U, although the resulting improvement to their customer service should easily make up for their loss.