Broadoaks Park, a new estate development in West Byfleet, is finally changing its house number signs which have been grammatically incorrect for months.
The first thing that can be seen upon entering the newly developed Broadoaks Park estate is a green sign that states ‘No’s 1-52’, which indicates the direction of those particular houses. Many residents of Broadoaks Park have noticed after recently moving into the estate that ‘No’s’ is grammatically incorrect as there shouldn’t be an apostrophe, and therefore should be changed.
The developer of this estate, Octagon, has looked into the matter after hearing from the residents, however as there is such a large number of the signs throughout the entire estate, they were unable to make any changes for quite a while. Because of this, the residents of Broadoaks Park decided to take this matter into their own hands in order to get rid of the grammatically incorrect signs that they have to see every day. After much deliberation within the community, an agreement was settled in changing ‘No’s’ to ‘Nos’ in regards to house numbers as ‘Nos’ is the correct contraction for ‘numeros’, therefore the apostrophe was unnecessary and should be removed.
From May to October, many residents have then continuously brought the matter to the attention of the management representatives in the hopes of the signs being replaced. After five months of persisting for Octagon to replace the signs, the residents have finally been informed that the signs will be replaced within the next two weeks – without the apostrophe.
After hearing this news, the residents of Broadoaks Park were of course delighted. One resident in particular, who was formerly a university lecturer of modern languages, stated: “If we are going to take care of the environment, we need not only to take care of the air, water and soil, but also language, which is definitely no less important.”
The residents of Broadoaks Park are now patiently awaiting their finally grammatically correct house number signs for which they have campaigned as a community. Who would have thought that grammatically incorrect house signs would have brought the Broadoaks Park community together, as they surely have bonded over their shared dislike for bad grammar.
