crick

[Peter McGraw]

You mean you never heard "crick" for 'small stream' in the Northwest,
Allen? Well, but you grew up in the city, right?

When we moved from urban Southern California to rural Oregon in the
1950s, the "crick" pronunciation was for me one of the features that
distinguished the local speech from my own.  But it was packaged with
-in' [In] for -ing and other ruralisms that I wouldn't have expected to
hear in Portland. I suppose I had been exposed to the word only in
writing up till then, since the place I had come from had no small
watercourses, at least not with water in them.

Peter Mc.

On Mon, 25 Oct 1999 18:34:52 -0700 "A. Maberry"
<maberry at U.WASHINGTON.EDU> wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Pafra & Scott Catledge wrote:
>
> > In the Deep South, a creek or a brook is for wading/bathing
> > in--a [crick] (spelling unknown) is what you get in your neck if
> > you keep it in a position to which you are unaccustomed.  I
> > have heard Nawtheners --I'll be PC and not use the little 'd'
> > word ;{)--say "crick" in the sense of "brook."
>
> That is certainly my understanding of the creek/crick distinction, and
> I'm about as far north as you can get without leaving the country. Up
> here "brook" is not used for streams at all, although the names of many
> recent housing developments in the area would make one think otherwise
> (usually spelled "brooke".
>
> Allen
> maberry at u.washington.edu

----------------------
Peter A. McGraw
Linfield College
McMinnville, Oregon
pmcgraw at linfield.edu