And so to the previously unremarked street of St Mary's Terrace in the village of Twyford, near Winchester. Or rather, the previously unremarked street of St Marys Terrace.
Or rather, the now famous street of St Mary's Terrace.
Yes, we're in punctuation wars territory (side note to my editor: please read this piece carefully).
Following Winchester Council's decision to set up a 'no apostrophe' policy for new signs, residents of St Mary's Terrace found their apostrophe culled.
This led to complaints from locals, pointing out that the lack of apostrophe was both grammatically incorrect and part of their street name, according to the Land Registry.
The old sign was subsequently found in a council dump, cleaned up and returned, apostrophe and all.
Now Winchester Council aren't alone in such apostasy. There is guidance from the Local Government Association that new street names should not include apostrophes: apparently modern computer systems don't like them and it makes it easier for postal and delivery services to have names without.
Personally, I'm not entirely convinced that delivery drivers should be the arbiters of grammatical rules, not least because they just bang in the post code to find out the address.
That and the fact that left in the hands of Evri, the rules would end up lost or delivered to the wrong address.
According to David Crystal's Making A Point, apostrophes are a relatively recent piece of punctuation, only coming into English usage in the sixteenth century.
It took another 150 years for a consensus to form over how they should be applied, with arguments still going on into the early 1900s: George Bernard Shaw, for example, avoided them whenever he could.
In 1890, in a move that would please Winchester Council, the US Board on Geographic Names decreed that there should no apostrophes in place names (Martha's Vineyard is one of just five 'possessive' names in the US).
Over here, place names and apostrophes can feel quite arbitrary; on the Piccadilly Line on the London Underground, Earl's Court and Barons Court are one stop (and one apostrophe) apart.
Many stores, too, have lost their punctuation. Whereas once you'd shop at Boot's or Waterstone's, now it's just Waterstones and Boots.
Yet if you're feeling hungry after all that retail therapy, you'll still end up at McDonald's.
It says something about the confused nature of the argument that the country's largest fast-food chain is more grammatically correct than its biggest book group.
I have to admit that I've been mocked by my sister for being the only person she knows who uses punctuation when sending a text.
Maybe I'm old fashioned but I think all this punctuation removal should come to a full stop.
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