When punctuation becomes a big deal in the council chamber
A chance discussion about making sure Land’s End correctly includes an apostrophe was turned into a Tweet by local democracy reporter Richard Whitehouse and, well, it all kind of went from there…
Sometimes it is the smallest things which explode to reach an audience far beyond anything you could ever imagine. For me it was a humble apostrophe.
A meeting of the full council at Cornwall Council had a busy agenda on a fairly average Tuesday morning and I had earmarked possible stories including opposition to a proposed merger of police forces and the ongoing saga of the possibility of an MP having to straddle the Cornwall and Devon border, the so-called Devonwall issue.
The latter was a key issue in Cornwall and my friends at BBC Radio Cornwall had lined me up to speak live on their lunchtime programme to give the latest update on the topic.
But while I was waiting for Devonwall to be discussed councillors displayed a prime example of local government navel gazing by indulging in 90 minutes on the stimulating topic of council ward boundaries….
And while the elected members tied themselves up in knots over the names of their council divisions I suddenly had my ears prick up when one councillor raised what they said was a minor issue — whether one of Cornwall’s most well known areas should have an apostrophe.
Councillor Sue James explained that she wanted to ensure that the Boundary Committee had the correct naming of the division for Land’s End — including the apostrophe.
Experts had been consulted and councillors endorsed the correct use of an apostrophe, all of which was supported unanimously in the council chamber. One of the very few occasions during the day that councillors agreed universally.
As I was live Tweeting the meeting I issued a quick Tweet: “Unanimous agreement that Land’s End should have an apostrophe. Yes, really.”
I expected that it might get the attention of fellow grammar pedants and local democracy reporters but also thought it might be a quirky story which would interest others. So, during the lunch break I put together a short story about how the council had decided that Land’s End should have an apostrophe.
The story gathered a modest audience on Cornwall Live and I didn’t think much more about it until the following day when I bumped into a councillor who was out jogging and told me it had featured on The Times’ homepage.
The BBC then started to see it attract more people until I was eventually told that it was, at one point, the eighth most read story on the BBC News website.
From there it snowballed — soon I was being told that Chris Evans mentioned it on his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show, as did Greg James over on Radio 1 and then Steve Wright also on Radio 2.
Soon, it was absolutely everywhere. It was almost impossible to pass over a news website in the UK without seeing mention of the Land’s End apostrophe.
Whilst some news outlets misinterpreted the story — some claimed that the council was changing all signs — most presented it in the way it was intended, a victory for pedants and grammar police everywhere.
If I hadn’t been sitting in that council meeting listening to the debate then it might have just slipped under the radar. And, while it’s not the most pressing issue in the world, it was one of those things which is sure to grab the attention of people everywhere.
