Two things worth complaining about.

So we’re back to me ranting and you ignoring my nerdy ranting. That’s right.

So what would I rant about? Let’s think…what’s one of my favourite things to rant over? Yes, grammar. Aaaaand…who shares my passion for this ranting…? YESS. RUSSELL SMITH. Let’s all bow down and worship him. Anyway, he runs a weekly column in the Globe and Mail on Thursdays in the review section, for those of you who have not been gloriously enlightened yet. And last Thursday, he talked about those insane Brits. Yes. You’d think the prissy and proper British would not be messing with our language. Of all things, because it’s THEIR language to begin with. But no. Mess they do. And big time. Over the past few years, there has been a discrepancy in the inclusion of apostrophes on street signs. Some signs have them, while others don’t. Recently, the Brits announced, for consistency, that they were just going to screw the apostrophe. No more apostrophes anywhere. On any signs. From now on. The guy who released the statement gave a few reasons:

1) Things in Britain are public domain [pfft, yeah, right, as long as you can afford them], so nothing should be owned. The church is everyone’s, not just St Paul’s, so clearly it should be called St Pauls Church.
2) The apostrophes confuse GPS systems.
3) Anyone should be able to find signs on maps or suchlike, even if they’re not anal-retentive about grammar [cough, read: like me]. That is, even if you aren’t educated in the use of apostrophes, you should be able to locate streets and locations on a map.

So now Russell, being the amazing person that he is, writes his refusal of all these claims. As for 2), he simply says it’s untrue. The GPS companies released a statement saying in no way whatsoever are the GPS systems confused with apostrophes. They search street names with the first few characters, or even by zip code, so really it doesn’t matter at all. An apostrophe won’t be in the first few characters. For the rest of his column, buy the Globe and Mail [honestly, the G&M and Russell should pay me for this].
As for the first and the last reasons, please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks they’re BALLS. Honestly. For 1), it doesn’t matter that it’s public domain or not. Seriously, St Paul’s Church was named AFTER St Paul. I doubt St Paul is still around. If you lived on Wendy’s Street, would you be offended? Like “gee, I’m mad because I live on this street and it’s public domain and Wendy has no right to claim it as hers because clearly Wendy is still alive and consequential and lording it over the street and RESTRICTING MY STREET RIGHTS!” No. People would not do that. Only freak grammar nerds who thought about apostrophes. Normal people would not even give it a second thought.
Ironically, the third reason is that eliminating apostrophes evens out the playing field for uneducated grammar children. SERIOUSLY. This is what is called a positive-feedback loop. It’s like TV. When TV and TV commercials became mainstream, researchers observed an overall drop in attention span. Why? Because the TV is such an ADD product. To watch TV, you only NEED a tiny attention span, so eventually long attention spans are dropped. So how do the marketers writing the commercials respond? They make the commercials even shorter, thereby shortening our attention spans more, thereby creating the necessity of even SHORTER commercials. Soon we’ll only be able to focus for five seconds. This feedback loop is the same with this uneducated-about-apostrophe business. If you create the environment as somewhere where you don’t NEED to know about apostrophes, then naturally fewer people will. It just encourages inattention to detail and grammar. Goodness. On top of that, it’ll make it harder for teachers to teach about apostrophes because all the street signs and other signs [like for St Paul's Church] won’t be using the apostrophes correctly. If everything you see is wrong, how are you supposed to learn what’s right?!
So now you’re thinking “yeah right, an apostrophe, whatevaaaaaar. This is stupid.” Firstly, you just used a hanging pronoun…but I’m not ranting about that this time. SECONDLY, and more importantly, an apostrophe may be an apostrophe, but think of the IMPLICATIONS. If the Brits are so willing to mess with the language, what will happen? Honestly. You don’t mess with language. You let it evolve by itself. And anyway, by the way it’s going, I don’t particularly enjoy how it’s evolving, but that’s not the point. These things are supposed to be left alone. The language is a gift from our ancestors for us to use, not something we can dick around with. Think about the poor babies that will have to grow up and deal with the lack of apostrophes. Or other atrocities the Brits will come up with. Jeez.

Wow, that was long. Anyway, continuing with my ranting…my second item is also from the newspaper. This isn’t so much a rant as a question. It’s been proposed recently to redo Jarvis Street. Jarvis used to be a cultural icon of Toronto. People used to walk down Jarvis street and be all old school, kind of like a walk down Yonge around Empress Walk now. Enjoyable. Small cafes, tree-lined sidewalks, parks, etc. And then the city mowed all that down to add a fifth lane for better traffic control. Only city planners NEVER LEARN. Making more streets and bigger street doesn’t reduce traffic. It increases it. No matter how many streets and lanes you build, there will always be enough cars to fill them. Goddammit. Anyway, so now the city wants to reverse what it’s done by getting rid of that fifth lane, widening sidewalks, planting trees, and encouraging street cafes and those quaint little things they had in the 20s, I’m assuming. Anyway. The commute will definitely be longer. I think the official time is three minutes more between Bloor and something else [how do they get these numbers anyway? Is that what government people are paid to do nowadays?]…it doesn’t really matter, the point is that it won’t be that much longer. And the city rebuttal for those commuters is that “yeah sure it’ll be longer, but you’ll enjoy it more”. Yeah huh. They want to change Jarvis from somewhere you go THROUGH, to somewhere you GO. You know, not just a highway in downtown, but actually a nice destination. What do you all think about this proposed idea? Too bad my wissues class hasn’t finished the Jane Jacobs yet, or else I’d have a super progressive look on this topic. Right now I’m pretty neutral, so I’d like to hear what you guys all have to say.

Drop a comment about either of my newspaper rants =]