dreckly

[Baker, John]

One indication suggestive of the status of "dreckly" as a word is that the same speaker, if describing travel by the shortest route, would refer to it as going "directly."  However, it remains true that the connection between "dreckly" and "directly" was never severed.  An analogy might be the term "young'uns," arguably lexicalized in its own right but still recognized as a form of "young ones."


John Baker




-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Laurence Horn
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 10:54 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: dreckly

On Mar 18, 2014, at 10:48 AM, Joan H. Hall wrote:

> DARE shows "dreckly" in the sense "Soon, after a while" to be found
> chiefly in the South and South Midland. No ideas about Cornish
> background, though.
>
I wonder to what extent this is really a word of its own, though.  If I heard someone say they'd be here /'drEkli/, I'd parse that as a reduced or allegro form of "directly" and not really a distinct lexeme deserving of its own entry any more than "awright" or "cumfterfbull".  Now "dreck(i)ly" = 'in a shitty manner', that would be something else.

LH

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