A Facebook friend of mine posted this etymology of the phrase “God willing, and the creek don’t rise.”
While this sounds plausible, is it true? I’ve always thought the saying referred to, you know, and actual creek.
(We had 8-10 inches of rain in these parts yesterday, so the creeks are rising.)
A few alternatives. I’ve always associated it with a moving body of water myself.
Hmm, thanks for the link. It looks like there is support for either interpretation.
Why would an educated man write “[anything] don’t rise”?
If you mean vs “doesn’t”, Creek is plural so “don’t” is correct. If you are referring to the contraction, I’ll leave that to more vigilant grammar/style nitpickers.
A lot of people have some funny notions about precisely what grammar is. Grammar is not the set of rules some set of stuffy old academes in an ivory tower say that people should use in speech; grammar is the set of rules that people actually do use in speech. And if speaking in colloquial dialect in many parts of the country (such as a politician who knows that everything he says will make its way to his constituents), then “the creek don’t rise”, referring to a small river, can be perfectly grammatical.
The argument against the story I posted in the OP is that apparently the phrase doesn’t (er, don’t) appear in the collected works of Benjamin Hawkins. So the claim that he capitalized the word Creek is unsupportable, apparently.
But as for the “Creek”…it was capitilized?
If so, it may not refer to a small rural stream.
It may refer to the Creek Indian tribe. And by rise, it woyuld mean go to war. As in rise in rebellion.
The vernacular suggests the rural, & 19th Century America, so it might be possible.
I’m not sure I would trust an assessment of the import of capitalization from someone who doesn’t seem to know that the words “nation’s capital” do not need to start with upper-case letters just because they appear in the middle of a sentence.
Also, this is from the same era where people would talk about things like “a Bill waf prefented in the Congrefs afsembled,” so we shouldn’t put much stock in their typographical flourifhes.
I find this notion offensive, and I ain’t gonna stand for it.
Besides, is it really an error if it’s intentional?
I thought this was about Spike Lee’s new HBO movie.
Why does Creek being capitalized mean it’s plural?
First, the implication is that being capitalized means it refers to the Creek Indian Nation. After that, I guess it depends on what you think it’s short for. Creek Indians? Pluran. Creek Nation? Singular.
How did I get involved in a grammar thread?
It has nothing to do with the Creek Indians.
The phrase has morphed over possibly hundreds of years, quite often in dialect speech, to what many are familiar with from the 1950s onward.
Stephen Goranson, one of the premier word/phrase finders over at the American Dialect Society found what(I think) is the earliest variant(so far)–1851.
.
If anyone can give a cite in the works of Benjamin Hawkins(1754-1816), then I might change my opinion.
This thread is the first time I’ve seen “creek don’t rise” in that phrase. Growing up, I heard, “God willing and the creeks don’t rise” a lot, but never singular.
Growing up, I always heard “Good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise”, but my folk are the epitome of rednecks.
I bet this is post facto “nicing up” an ungrammatical idiom to make it more acceptable.
For the record, though, I’ve never heard or read it with a plural.
It is to be expected that sayings like this will vary from state to state, town to town, family to family. Who knows? It’s been a while. I may be misremembering.
I always heard it as “God willing and the crick don’t rise…”
For some people, that’s the pronunciation of “creek,” not actually a variant word.