* Saint and Street format conventions

[mjashby]

Not that complex really Many (most) cities in the UK were originally divided up by Parish boundaries (or the expansion of building within separate parishes eventually resulted in large towns/cities being formed) and districts inherited the names of the original Parish, e.g. St Pancras, Middlesex (London) etc., which I believe was originally a chapelry of St Marylebone; later as the cities rapidly grew in size additional churches were built, often initially as chapelries of the original mother church, but later consecrated as 'full' Parish Churches with there own designated parish boundaries. These rarely seem to have resulted in a direct change in the designated Ecclesiastical District or 'administrative boundary' and still retain the original parish name, but many resulted in being recognised in new local Street names etc., which may well have been built on land previously owned/sold by the church. Some churches have obviously become disused/deconsecrated/demolished/destroyed over time and their parishes were then absorbed by other neighbouring churches, but original street names have often been preserved.

Mervyn

[AdrianBruce]

Yeah - the problems with the Bristol areas appear to come from:

• Some of the parishes crossed the City boundary and therefore had an in-parish and an out-parish bit;
• Some of the out-parish bits became parishes in their own right;
• ... whose parish church's dedication naturally bore no relation to the inheritted name of the out-parish;
• None of which would be a real problem until...
• Some of those out-parishes were amalgamated;
• ... which doesn't appear to always show up in the census!;
• Then some become civil parishes which might or might not get confused with the ongoing church parish because each might be split or amalgamated separately!:
• The name (like St. Paul's - or is it St. Pauls?!) gets applied to a suburb that seems rather smaller than any prior definition;
• There's no precise documentaton of what happened when - the VisionOfBritain site doesn't quite have the full story;
• The source just says "St. Paul's". Yeah, which?

Somehow it all just seems too much in Bristol!

I just spent an hour over St. Paul's to see if I could sort it - in the end, especially with the last bullet point, I've put a few notes in the place-record about the various meanings and left it!

[Peter Collier]

Another point that has not been made so far is that the general convention in British English today is not to use a full stop for abbreviations (except perhaps for an initial letter representing a name), but American English still uses them extensively.

If it helps, "correct and current" usage in British English is to use full stops for abbreviations, but not for contractions. An abbreviation is a word with its end completely lopped off, whereas a contraction has letters removed from its middle but keeps (as a minimum) its first and last letters. Some examples:

Doctor > Dr
Saint > St
Reverend > Revd
Reverend > Rev.
Mister John Smith > Mr J. Smith

Street is tricky: Is St an abbreviation (STreet) or a contraction (StreeT)? The OED opines it is a abbreviation and is correctly written with a full stop (St.), which has the added benefit of differentiating it from the contraction of saint.

It appears British English had used full stops for both abbreviations and contractions in the past, as American English still does, so the waters are a little muddy at times. I'm not sure when the convention changed (or maybe the British have just always been confused about it?).

[Gowermick]

Peter,
If people can’t differentiate between Their and There, or Too and To, what hope that they can handle full stops in abbreviations?

[Gardengirl]

Thank you, Peter, for clarifying that. I had never even thought about a difference between an abbreviation and a contraction. Every day is a learning day!

[Peter Collier]

Peter,
If people can’t differentiate between Their and There, or Too and To, what hope that they can handle full stops in abbreviations?

Very little, I should imagine. But it's good to have something to aspire to.

[Peter Collier]

A slight tangent: I've noticed over the years from many types of publications that all street names used to be compounded (written with a hyphen), with the second part in lower case? For example, High-street, Greenfield-road, Acacia-avenue, etc.

It looks most odd to modern eyes. Does anyone know when that stopped being a thing? It certainly seemed to be ubiquitous in the 19th C, so it must have faded away in the early 20th, I suppose?

[LornaCraig]

I have noticed that too, particularly in entries in the National Probate Calendar. I don't know when it stopped, but I have a hunch (only a hunch) about why it started. I wonder if the hyphen was inserted to make it clear that the location was a street/road/lane rather than a place of the same name. For example Warwick-street or Manchester-square or Primrose-Hill-lane. Without the hyphen "John Smith of Warwick street" (or "Street") might have been misread as "John Smith of Warwick". And perhaps the street/road was only given a capital letter when it became formally recognised as part of the name, rather than just a description (as in "the square named after Manchester" or "the lane leading to Primrose Hill").

[Martin Tolley]

Lorna, I don't know if it is standard in "legalese" but probate records interestingly have the hyphen as almost the only punctuation present, no commas or full points - the only exceptions mostly are full points after the s and d of shillings and pence.

[Mark1834]

Two reasons - the legal tradition is to use phrasing that is unambiguous and does not require punctuation for clarity. Secondly, it avoids any problems with changing the meaning of a sentence by inserting punctuation after it is written.

[mjashby]

I believe the original reason for High-street, Greenfield-road, Acacia-avenue etc was to present individual address lines as a 'single hyphenated word', thereby ensuring they remained on the same line of text throughout the time when the convention was not to allow conjoined typed/printed words to be split across lines; and also to use fully justified text to limit the possibility of anything being added to the end of lines/paragraphs. 'Double-spacing' between paragraphs was also a 'no-no' in many documents for the same reason.

Mervyn