How do YOU pronounce Scartho?

IF there’s one question that’s guaranteed to cause an argument around here, it’s how to pronounce the name of a certain area. Scartho looks an easy word to pronounce, but there’s at least four different versions being used.

Should it be Scaffa? Scatha? Scar-thow, or perhaps Scar-though?

Even the Wikipedia article can’t agree on how it should be said.

The online encyclopaedia can be edited by anyone, but behind-the-scenes of the article is full of arguments on what exactly it should say on pronunciation.

One Wikipeda editor said: “I come from the neighbouring town of Cleethorpes, and would like to add that we always pronounced ‘Scartho’ as ‘Scather’, which rhymes with ‘Scaffer’. “Rightly or wrongly, we were frequently t aught that this pronunciation comes from old Norse or Danish, where the ‘o’ would have been ‘ø’. ‘Scaffer’ was regarded as the incorrect pronunciation by an uneducated person.”

They added that saying ‘Scar-thoe’ used to be seen as ‘snobbish’ and a sign that the person wasn’t from the area.

However, others claimed that it was commonly spelt with an e on the end, suggesting that it should still be pronounced that way. “It is true that it used to be spelt “Scarthoe” before “Scartho” and this spelling was still prevalent in the late 1960s and early 1970s when my mother started school,” they said.

Another lifelong resident said that they had never heard the village pronounced as ‘Scather’ in their lives.

Some users admitted that the different pronunciations can caused confusion.

“I was talking about a village called ‘Scar-tho’ which my friend referred to ‘Scaffer’. It was only later that he confessed that he thought we were talking about two different places.”

One said that regardless of how it was meant to be pronounced, locals should have the last say.

“It doesn’t matter if it is meant to be pronounced “Scarthoe”, because if a large percentage of the village call it “Scaffer” (or rather “Scaffa”, as I’ve always thought), nothing is going to change that.”

At the risk of opening a can of worms, how do you pronounce Scartho, and do you care what the ‘proper’ way is? Let us know by e-mailing viewpoint@grimsbytelegraph.co.uk