[Ads-l] North Click (North Carolina, 1975)

[Bonnie Taylor-Blake]

A recent discussion here about "Cackalacky" as a nickname for the Carolinas
reminded me that "Click" is sometimes used in the same way.

I had thought this had emerged from the hip-hop/rap culture of the '90s,
but it seems to have preceded this era.

Here's "North Click" in 1975, which puts it pretty close to the so-far
earliest printed examples that we have of "Cackalacky" (1972, 1974).

It appeared in Mike Stanford's "Vieques," a short story that was published
in "The Archive," a Duke University literary magazine. The text describes
Marines encountering a bull, but Stanford drops in the following.

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They had sailed out of a North Carolina winter into this sudden summer, but
at home and even in North Click it is just starting spring, and pale green
light blurs in the trees where she is walking to class across a long lawn
stroked with shade, and a breeze is tilting her skirt up in back and a kid
with his hair in a pigtail is walking behind her, looking.

[The Archive, Fall 1975 (Volume 88, Number 1), pp. 63-65;
https://archive.org/details/archive87durh/page/n255/mode/2up?q=north+click]

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Early in the volume, the author is described as having attended Duke for
one year before undertaking a three-year stint in the Marines. After his
return to Duke, he was said to have been writing a novel about the Corps.

I'd previously found references to "Calinky" and "Carolinky," used for both
states, in 1930s issues of the U.S. Marines' The Leatherneck. I don't know,
however, whether "Click" has any relationship to those terms or whether any
of these originated within the Marines. (Of course, "click" for "kilometer"
has been used in the U.S. military since at least the early '60s.)

-- Bonnie

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