Last Straw

I’m in Aotearoa New Zea­l­and for a couple of weeks and driv­ing about provided me with the great priv­ilege of catch­ing up with the sea of enlight­en­ment that is NZ talk­back radio, in this case the lovely Leighton Smith. Flip­ping through the chan­nels I just had to stop and listen to one of Smith’s callers com­plain­ing that if they had wanted to call Wan­ganui “Whan­ganui” all that time ago they would have used a bloody ‘F’. Suf­fice to say Smith didn’t offer up any wis­dom to his schol­arly caller.

I’m nat­ur­ally inclined to side with cor­rect­ing the spelling mis­take but I’m also sym­path­etic to the view that the “Wan­ganui” spelling is indeed an import­ant part of the his­tory and cul­ture of the area, even if ori­gin­ally a res­ult of ignorance.

Which is why I have to agree with Read­ing the Maps on the mat­ter. Use both.