"Phew."
"Phew?"
"Well, you didn't call them scones."
"Ha! You should be shot if you call them scones. It's definitely scones, not scones, never scones; who says 'scone'?"
This is the second time this debate has emerged this week. It is of course, unsolvable: people from the North (particularly Yorkshire) grew up pronouncing everything that ends in 'one' to rhyme with 'gone' or 'gun' and people from the South cherish that magic E that makes it a 'pinecone' and not a 'pinecon'. So as long as there are families and accents, this interminable debate will rage tediously on. Does it matter that there are thousands of English words like 'cone' and hardly any like 'gone'? Does it matter at all, that that old fastest-cake-in-the-world joke just doesn't work unless it's... gone?
Let me nail my colours to the mast as a descendant of Northerners and a dweller of the Home Counties: it is definitely 'scone'. It has to be! Saying it the other way doesn't make any sense at all. I kept my head low beneath the parapet today, just in case my colleagues suggested I be frogmarched out at gunpoint.
Phew. Hope that clears it up. You know me: not one for sitting on the fence. Though I won't be suggesting persecution for you if you say 'scone' instead of 'scone', obviously.
"So is it cream first or is it jam then?" asked one of my colleagues.
I rolled my eyes.
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