The use, or lack thereof, of the apostrophe in our town’s name has been an ongoing source of distress. Either you’re incensed by the continued usage by signmakers and media outlets, or you’re incensed by others’ demands for strict adherence to what you believe is a non-crucial or questionable convention.
Apostrophe enforcers, it should be argued, have bigger fish to fry. The most recent post at www.apostropheabuse.com shows a photo of the wall of a Kindergarten classroom, decorated for the occasion with 20 mortarboard hats and a sign stating: “Graduate’s 2009.”
“They don’t have a chance,” declares the caption.
Justification for the omission of our town’s apostrophe has long been tough to pin down; the erroneous use of apostrophes on signs, meanwhile, runs rampant.
It could be argued that our longstanding obsession with our apostrophe is a microcosmic reflection of our place in Canada — a land teetering on the edge of spelling and grammatical upheaval.
According to Wikipedia, the term “Canadian English” was first used publicly in 1857 by Reverend A. Constable Geikie, the first minister of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Kitchener, in an address to the Canadian Institute. Critiquing what he heard upon arriving from Scotland, he described “a corrupt dialect” against which he urged more recent English immigrants to resist.
What has developed since that time has, by most accounts, been the product of the combined major influences of England, America and France (moderated by Quebec). Thus, we have the English-style, double-consonants in controlling and councillor; the American-style tire, truck and gasoline (as opposed to tyre, lorry and petrol); and the French-inflected honour and kilometre.
But these are disputes of the past. Certainly, there are many instances of contraventions to these conventions, and the English language of any stripe is so  irregular that it’s sometimes impossible to get it right even if you think you know every Canadian rule. But, among established Canadian institutions like the media or academia, there seems to be a level of confidence that the aforementioned matters of our bastardized spellings and vocabulary are stable.
Punctuation, however, is a different matter. This element of our language has only become more cloudy since the advent of the internet. And, judging from the recent actions of civic politicians in England’s second largest city, it looks like it will only get worse.
“Councillors in Birmingham have walked into a punctuation storm after deciding to scrap apostrophes from the city’s road signs,” reported the Metro newspaper earlier this year.
From this side of the Atlantic, the move drew criticism from Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith, who wrote, “even the Birmingham Children’s Hospital is the Birmingham Childrens Hospital, dashing the ambitions of that city’s schoolteachers to ever hope to teach children how to write.”
But supporters of the move — which, it was reported, aims to bring an end to “decades of dispute” — said it reduced confusion about whether or not to use the apostrophe. While it has been employed on the well-known St. Paul’s Square landmark, it has generally been absent from places like Kings Heath, Acocks Green and Druids Heath.
In the US, by contrast, there has apparently been a longstanding practice not to use the possessive in place names. As a result, we have names like St. Paul, Minnesota and Washington Square.
And here we are, as a Canadian microcosm, using the possessive but opting against an apostrophe.
But the next battleground for the St. Marys name may be the period.
In England, the professional Southampton Football Club plays in St Mary’s stadium, and a now-unused station in London’s Underground was called St Mary’s. Here, by contrast, we have adopted the American convention of using periods in names like Mr. Magoo, Queen St., and Mount St. Helen.
Then came internet domain names. Typing a period into a website or email address is done at your peril. As a result, such addresses using our town’s name must switch to stmarys. Increasingly, to the dismay of some, this has been appearing away from the internet browser’s address line, on signs,  in  emails, and in job applications.
Our town’s period is not the sole victim of internet-fuelled language disruption. Much hand-wringing has been given over to what some believe has been a bastardization of English by text-messaging teenagers employing a code of their own. And the endless creation of new words, simply by adding an “e-” prefix, is tedious at best.
If it gets bad enough with our period, perhaps there is a solution. Harkening back to the less-recognized Quebec influence on Canadian English, perhaps we could switch to the French convention of using hyphens. Thus, St. Marys could be transformed to look more like Ste-Hyacinthe or St-Jean-sur-Richelieu. Hyphens don’t disrupt domain names, and in the spirit of Canada Day, it could promote interprovincial unity.
Here’s to the hyphen.