The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 9 (January 1, 1930)
Utopian Euphonisms
page 42
Utopian Euphonisms.
“My Country ‘tis of thee.”
It is difficult to say with any academical exactitude who was the original perpetrator of this ambrosial ambiguity, but if it was not Theobold the Thug as he bit his native sod in
days of yore, then of a verity it was some patriotic patrician historically hysterical, or perchance a frenzied farmer paradoxically placing a monetary “monkey” on his broad acres to satisfy his narrow creditors; but whosoever unleashed this Utopian euphonism provided elocutionary evidence that, field of blood or field of spud, the spirit which has made the land fit for heroes and harrows has not come uncorked—the spirit which has produced the country where husbandmen—and bachelors too—have converted the open spaces to oaten places; the spirit which has moved them to wangle the mangel, capitalise the cow, and till the paddocks to pad the tills.