I’m mildly amused but mostly slightly irritated by those seeking to attack the decision by Waterstones not to use the apostrophe in their name any more. I’m annoyed mostly because of their reasoning – it’s really not that inconvenient, right?
Wrong.
My surname is O’Connell. In general, I don’t use the apostrophe when I enter my name on computer systems. It does not appear on my bank cards for example, because I asked them to take it off when I changed my name. It’s not on my blood donor card, because I did not put it on the forms when I signed up.
But some people will “helpfully” reinsert it if I leave it off. This leads to problems. Not just the Little Bobby Tables problem, but that’s bad enough when systems won’t let you enter it but still require an exact match on your name. More than once I’ve started at a company to find my email is “Zoe.O’Connell@company.com” which isn’t a valid address.
And you can forget personalised domains, because someone is bound to try zoeo’connell.com which also won’t work.
Fix the computers? I wish it was that easy but humans can’t handle it either. I’ve been stuck at the front gates of data centres or on the phone to some call centre more than once because they are typing “O-Connell”, “O,Connell” or even just Connell on the computer to search for me.
I’ve ranted about this before, back in 2009:
I’ve decided that I’m going to change my name to संसृति कुमारी. This is, as far as I can figure out, the closest you can get to “Life Maiden” (Zoe Imogen) in सम्भाषनसंस्कृत (Sanskrit). I shall write to everyone – banks etc. – and inform them of my name change. Of course, they’ll all write back and tell me that they’re very sorry, but their computer systems can’t handle सम्भाषनसंस्कृत letters.
To which there’s a simple reply – You can’t handle the stupid apostrophie in my surname as it is without breaking things, why would having it in Sanskrit many any difference?
So, until someone can fix the whole Internet and teach all humans everywhere to enter data properly, I’ll stick without it.
(As an aside, there is likely not even supposed to be an apostrophe in the name anyway. I’ve seen various explanations but it’s most likely simply an anglicisation that happened during the first censuses of Ireland to mean “of the Connell clan”, “son/daughter of Conall” etc.)
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#1 by Keith Edkins on 13 January 2012 - 15:26
I think Ó Connell means “grandson of Connell”, and the accent has fallen off to become O’. In which case you probably should be Ní Connell – try that as a search term!
The Waterstones apostrophe is a nasty 18th century innovation anyway. As the e in old genitive forms like “foxes tail” was increasingly dropped to give “fox’s tail”, forms like “dogs tail” were illogically conformed to “dog’s tail” even though there is no letter omitted.
Now to wrestle with the Captcha. I hate them! What sort of word is rtmedy anyway?
#2 by nonconformistradical on 13 January 2012 - 17:24
Since the apostrophe in Waterstones signifies possession and since this chain of bookstores was founded by one Tim Waterstone the presence of the apostrophe in the shop name seems entirely appropriate – the chain was – at one time – Tim Waterstone’s chain.
#3 by Stephen Glenn on 13 January 2012 - 19:19
I feel your pain
Stíofán Pádraig Ó Gleann