CORRESPONDENCE.

Waipa Post, Volume VII, Issue 316, 22 May 1914, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE.

(Out correspondents' opinions are their own: the responsibility of editorial items makes sufficient ballast for the editor's shoulders. It is necessary that all letters for publication should bear the name of the writer — not necessarily for publication, but as evidence of good faith.)

TO THE EDITOR.

SIR, —May I, through your columns, make a really valuable suggestion to the Chamber of Commerce, and that is that it should urge upon the city fathers the advisability of cutting off the appendix of the town,, which in this instance is not carried somewhere under the town's waist hand, but right in front of its nose. It really is not an appendix but an affix, which amounts in this instance really to the same thing. In short, it is a useless and burdensome bit of ornamentation, which we could well do: without, and once we had cut it off, like the man who has had his appendix successfully removed, we would breathe a sigh of relief and say, " There, thank goodness that's .done, and we're so much better off." I refer, Mr Editor, not to the obsolete town pump, nor the hump on the footpath outside the oldest store, nor to the livery stable that sits on the street, nor to the kink in the main road, nor to the door mat that trips one up as he enters the public library, but to the useless Te in front of Awamutu. What a mouthful the whole name now is—"Te Awamutu!" Let us now drop the Te and say only Awamutu. The Te is merely a particle—and a particle is a very small and unnecessary bit of language. It is equal to saying The Auckland, The Wellington. Put in that way it appears ridiculous, and so it really is. The whole means as we know- " The end of the river." We can drop the " the " and still have it meaning the same. I doubt not that at one time Oxford was Te Oxford, and Cambridge Te Cambridge, and so on, but men got tired of the useless and uneuphoneous "Te " and dropped it. Let us drop the Te and have an easily pronounced name of our own left. —I am, etc.,

Awamutu,