These immortal words resonate to this day as they stir our rugby warriors to great victories and enable them to see the sun again if the Boks ever threaten to stick them in a kumara pit.
As a relative newcomer to the "H" debate, I'm pretty relaxed either way. But perhaps just to say this - throughout history names and words in all languages, both of places and people, have come, altered and gone like autumn leaves.
In Elizabethan England there were nearly 100 variations of the surname Shakespeare, often happily used interchangeably by their owners. Similarly, many Maori names, for myriad reasons, have contracted and transmogrified to the point where the common usage version becomes the new norm.
With no disrespect, Otkou ended up being Otago because the squiggley things we call letters that try to represent on paper the bits of the phonetic omelette that is spoken language just happened to crumble that way.
For better or worse, for just a few decades short of a couple of centuries now, in what is now W(h)anganui city, the majority of people living here - both Maori and pakeha and all shades in between - have grown up with just the "W" spelling.
The present contention is that this is somehow disrespectful to local iwi (even though no disrespect was/is intended) because, it is said, without the "H" the name is meaningless. In other words, it doesn't concur with the generally accepted English spelling for the Maori language word meaning bay or estuary - Whanga - from whence the area and river derived its name.
But this is a peccadillo that can be instantly remedied. New words and meanings happen all the time. It's fun, easy, and creative - hippies, yuppies and floppies; snogging, blogging and clagging; dissing, barfing and waka-jumping. See? Instant overnight vocab successes.
So because language is only ever our servant, from this moment on let it now be decreed that a new word "Wanga" has come into being which, like its close cousin, "Whanga", also now has an official meaning of bay or estuary. Whanga-nui (estuary-big); now, ditto - Wanga-nui (estuary-big).
And let the dictionaries do what they only ever can do, and that is play catch-up in their own time to the runaway train that is ever-evolving language.
I can sense a spirit of compromise wafting in the balmy breezes. And given that it behoves us all as co-inhabitants of our fragile planet to demonstrate due respect to all, herein lies the compromise.
Let local iwi and hapu exercise the power they have to declare that from now on there exists a word "Wanga" whose meaning exactly accords with "Whanga".
Similarly, let the local businesses, agencies and services - both public and private - that would otherwise be constrained to outlay many hundreds of thousands of dollars organising new letterheads, general signage and the like, make their contribution, too.
How about they donate to a permanent scholarship fund, say, 50 per cent of the costs they would otherwise take to implement all these changes to their brand identities. This scholarship fund would be put under the aegis of local iwi to be dispersed to promote further education and employment opportunities for young rangatahi. Talk about win-win!
-Frank Greenall has a Master's degree and managed Far North Adult Literacy before moving to Wanganui.
