Scone with the Wind: Lower Hutt's best cheese scones
Stuff journalist Virginia Fallon checked out scones in Lower Hutt last week.
And how do you pronounce scone?
There are two ways you’ll hear the word said: one rhymes with gone and the other with cone; some insist the latter is the posh way to say it; others urge the former is correct.
Dr Simon Overall, a linguistics lecturer at the University of Otago, pronounces it to rhyme with gone, though says there’s no ‘’correct’’ way to say the word.
“If you look at the way the word is written, you would guess gone, but we have lots of words like that. English spelling gives you clues, but it often misleads,” he said.
“Cambridge University did a dialect survey and asked people do you pronounce it to rhyme with gone or cone, and it's quite noticeable, at least around the British Isles, that in Scotland it’s almost entirely gone.“
England is mostly the same, while the Republic of Ireland is almost the opposite: “It’s really a regional thing. In terms of the way New Zealand was settled you obviously get quite a mix.”
As for whether one pronunciation is posher than the other, the Queen rhymes it with gone. I tell him I almost wish I pronounced it the other way because then this series could be called Game of Scones.
🧩😏 Riddle me this, Neighbours…
I am an odd number. Take away a letter and I become even. What number am I?
Do you think you know the answer?
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Poll: 🤖 What skills do you think give a CV the ultimate edge in a robot-filled workplace?
The Reserve Bank has shared some pretty blunt advice: there’s no such thing as a “safe” job anymore 🛟😑
Robots are stepping into repetitive roles in factories, plants and warehouses. AI is taking care of the admin tasks that once filled many mid-level office jobs.
We want to know: As the world evolves, what skills do you think give a CV the ultimate edge in a robot-filled workplace?
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Some Choice News!
DOC is rolling out a new tool to help figure out what to tackle first when it comes to protecting our threatened species and the things putting them at risk.
Why does this matter? As Nikki Macdonald from The Post points out, we’re a country with around 4,400 threatened species. With limited time and funding, conservation has always meant making tough calls about what gets attention first.
For the first time, DOC has put real numbers around what it would take to do everything needed to properly safeguard our unique natural environment. The new BioInvest tool shows the scale of the challenge: 310,177 actions across 28,007 sites.
Now that we can see the full picture, it brings the big question into focus: how much do we, as Kiwis, truly value protecting nature — and what are we prepared to invest to make it happen?
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