Apostrophes in Names Stir Lot O’ Trouble

It can stop you from voting, destroy your dental appointments, make it difficult to rent a car or book a flight, even interfere with your college exams. More than 50 years into the Information Age, computers are still getting confused by the apostrophe. It’s a problem familiar to O’Connors, D’Angelos, N’Dours and D’Artagnans across America.

(via AP)

Well, well, well! There’s another problem with online forms: quite of few of them return an error message ‘last name can’t be a single letter’ when I give it as ‘R’. I can’t help it but south Indians have initials for last names. For example, mine is R as my dad’s name is RanganathaChari!

When Niall O’Dowd tried to book a flight to Atlanta earlier this year, the computer system refused to recognize his name. The editor of the Irish Voice newspaper could book the flight only by giving up his national identity.

Recommended Books on Usability

write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

Leave a Comment