When something becomes too difficult or a burden, just ban it! That appears to be the philosophy that the city of Birmingham in the UK used when the city council decided to ban the apostrophe from all city signs:

The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names should ever take an apostrophe.

As absurd as this story is, there is more:

However the decision was described as "absolute defeatism" by John Richards, the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

"This is setting a terrible example," Mr Richards said. "It seems retrograde, dumbing down really. All over Birmingham, and in other cities, teachers are trying to teach children correct grammar and punctuation. Now children will go around Birmingham and see utter chaos."

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With the sad passing of John Updike last week, it will still be years before his true impact on the literary world will be realized. But that hasn’t stopped publications like the New York Times from trying to place Mr. Updike in proper perspective, like they did in this article:

Mr. Updike was also America’s last true man of letters, an all-purpose writer and a custodian of literary culture. He wrote more, and in more different genres — stories, novels, poems, essays, reviews, occasional journalism — than anyone since Henry James, and it’s hard to imagine how he can be replaced. Who has the energy, or the eyeballs, for that much reading?

And in the very next paragraph, Mr. Updike is shown as a man who lived outside of the literary culture he dominated so much of:

In many ways, though, Mr. Updike was an unlikely man of letters. He lived a quiet, burgherly life in a seaside Boston suburb and seldom went to literary parties. He dropped by New York now and then to visit museums and see relatives, but he never stayed long. He didn’t teach; he almost never gave blurbs; he belonged to no literary school or faction. His idea of a reward after a morning’s work was not lunch or drinks with other writers but a round of golf with his buddies.

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