Hope I didn’t flub my search. Surprised not to see this question here before.
Everyone knows the old saying “Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise”, meaning “barring unforeseen circumstances”. (And, coincidentally, a very elegant counterpoint to “Come hell or high water”.)
I hardly ever hear that phrase nowadays without someone piping up about the phrase correctly being “Creek” (the American Indian nation) rather than “creek” (small stream).
Apparently, in Georgia, the theory is that the phrase originates with Indian agent Ben Hawkins (cite with link).
Surprisingly, I find no reference to this phrase in the indexes of my Funk books.
Anyone got any concrete background on this phrase which might settle the matter?
The site you linked seemed to make a big deal out the capitalization of the word, although it didn’t say it was capitalized by Ben Hawkins, only that it “would be correctly written” that way. This strikes me as a weak point to make, considering that spelling and capitalization were far from standardized in that era, even among the “college-educated and a well-written.” More telling, although the site claims Hawkins originated the phrase, it offers no evidence to support the claim, going no further than a vague mention of it being “somewhere in his preserved writings.” I find the site utterly unconvincing.
I’m practically certain it’s in relation to the water, simply because that’s the simpler of the two explanations.
Anyone who’s lived around intermittent bodies of water in a region prone to flooding can tell you how much hell a creek that’s risen beyond its banks can raise. If the creek rises, you immediately have a serious problem on your hands and everything else gets ignored for a while.
Well, to be fair, the capitalization reference in the cite arose b/c of the question posed to that author. The author’s point was that BH would have written “Creek” because he was referring to the Creek Nation (not vice versa).
My concern also was that even if it can be found among his writings, that doesn’t prove he originated it. He could have been punning on an existing phrase, after all.
Anyone got any dates or prior sources?
My suspicion is that “Creek” is folk etymology used to win bar bets. But I can’t prove it. Yet.
FWIW, the exact same saying exists in other languages - in Danish: “Om Gud vil og vandene ikke stiger”, “if God is willing and the waters do not rise”. I haven’t been able to find a reference as to when the term was first used, though.
That just makes the argument weaker. If the author had said he did capitalize it, he’d have something to support his contention. But by saying he would have capitalized it, he’s in effect saying “this is what he meant, and therefore this is how he would have written it,” with nothing to back up the initial claim about what was meant. He’s starting with an unsupported statement and then drawing a conclusion from it. That conclusion is irrelevant until he shows some evidence for the statement.
Oh, certainly. That’s the problem. The author isn’t supporting his claim at all, just making the claim. I only included the cite as background on the BH theory. Cheers -StD
As a matter of interest, this phrase came up over at the American Dialect Society recently. The earliest cite for the phrase in print that has been found so far is 1892.
That doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist earlier, but I would have though that if it were invented in the early 1800’s we would have caught sight of it rather before 1892.
That’s cool. SamClem, can you tell me where the earliest known print cite is? Would be interesting to note if it’s from an area w/ Scandinavian population.
