Where? Here’s a clearer map with just creek vs brook. There are not many areas where “creek” is not used.
ETA: Ah, so maybe I’m missing your point. For some reason, I thought you were saying in most places, just using “creek” will identify you as an outsider Yes, there are certainly places where using “creek” will identify you as an outsider. Looks like the northeast, especially, but also pockets of Florida, small pockets of the Southwest, and a bit in the upper plains states.
Slippy. In Pittsburgh, it’s never slippery, it’s “be careful, it’s slippy outside.”
You’re getting it. I’m talking about most of the places that don’t say creek, those are the exceptions. Most places do say creek. Which sort of explains why it sounds odd in the places that don’t use it, they’ve stuck to some other description than creek despite what the rest of the country says.
I had heard the term “putt putt golf” used in Japan but had no idea what where it came from.
There is a city in Utah called “Weber” which is pronounced with a long E by Utah residents.
“Putt-Putt” is a brand name for a franchise chain of miniature golf “fun” centers. Mostly east of the Mississippi but also has some in California.
I recall there being one around Reno way back when. So there can be a temporal as well as geographical component to its mis-use as a generic.
In Cleveland, when I was like 5 years old and going to kindergarten, we were passing by Doan Brook* and this kid looked down and said “There’s the crick.” I don’t know what part of the country this kid was from, though it may well have been dialect from some nearby part of Ohio, but as a native of Cleveland I was aware it sounded wrong and it should be creek.
Once in 8th grade religion class a priest ranted at our dialect speakers for being “iconoclasts” because of saying crick for creek and again I was puzzled: Who says that? It’s of dialectal origin from somewhere in England: Tolkien invented or used the place name “Crickhollow”.
**Brook *is a word from old New England, characteristic of that strip of northeast Ohio along the lakeshore when it was the Connecticut Western Reserve. Practically all creeks in and around Cleveland are “brooks”.
There are two pronunciations of “Missouri”. One almost everyone uses. The other is largely confined to part of the state (I think Harry S Truman used the less common pronunciation).
Ah yes, the story of
[spoiler] Shibboleth
*And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
This is an explanation on wikipedia, quoted from Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand:
"In Australia and New Zealand, the words “fish and chips” are often used to highlight the difference in each country’s short-i vowel sound [ɪ] and asking someone to say the phrase can identify which country they are from. Australian English has a higher forward sound *, close to the y in happy and city, while New Zealand English has a lower backward sound [ɘ], a slightly higher version of the a in about and comma. Thus, New Zealanders hear Australians say “feesh and cheeps,” while Australians hear New Zealanders say “fush and chups.”
I lived in Malaysia, where the tag lah is used plenty in English and even more so in Malay. It comes from Cantonese or Hokkien Chinese. In South China languages they use tags to modify the tone and mood of an entire utterance. It’s exactly the same as the smiley faces we use here and on Facebook, except that the smilies are pronounced.
Lah in Malay means we’re friends, that the utterance it tags is said in the context of us being friends. The original Chinese 啦 la is used so that a request doesn’t sound like a command.
That’s from the original Anglo-Saxon conjugation of the verb, which survived into Early Modern English and even later in some patches.
The only people I knew growing up who said “crick” were my cousins in western Wisconsin. I grew up in Chicago, and never heard it there.
Never heard anyone say “brook” when I was growing up, or for that matter today (I have lived my adult life in the Northeast).
Blimey seems to be a very London word, or at least London and the bits of the counties around it where lots of ex-Londoners settled after the war. I could be wrong and it’s used elsewhere, but it’s been picked up on by several Northerners who were surprised I actually used the word.
Innit is also a fairly London-centric word. It’s short for isn’t it, but is used much more widely than that, to mean “ain’t that right,” or “totally,” or loads of other things. Often followed by bruv. Apparently some people think it’s modern urban slang but it’s been used by pretty much everyone not posh in London since I was a kid, and I’m 43, so it’s not really modern.
I live in SoCal now, but I still say
I don’t say buggy, but I know plenty of people back home who do. The word that immediately would place me in a region more specific than “the South” if more people knew about it is “boonkie,” for booty or ass.
Brook is rare. Stream is very common here in the Northeast. Bear in mind that the official name of the body of water is not that significant. There aren’t many of these bodies of water in most communities, their official names are not well known, they often have a local name, or sometimes none. People will refer to ‘the stream’ or ‘the crick/creek’ instead of using a name, and the designation in the name wouldn’t matter, if the locals say ‘stream’ it doesn’t matter if it’s got an actual name like “John’s Creek”.
What a wicked pissah thread.
We had a crick on our farm. Any thing that met the definition of a creek was called a crick.
Except the suburb of Milwaukee was called Oak Creek*. Because that was a name, and that was how it was pronounced.
*Except for M’waukeens that made fun of da sout siders, der hey. Dey called it “Ook Creet”.
I believe that “creek” is the most common “official” place designation in my region (Hudson Valley of NY state). People use it generically too: people would say “cross over the creek” or “go until you get to the creek” or “they went down to the creek.”
The second most common “official” term is probably “kill,” as befits the Dutch heritage. But no one says “down by the kill” or “Gee, the kill is running fast today.” They’d use “creek.”
I guess I hear stream now and then. Certainly not often though.
burpette is from western PA, and “Gian’Iggle” puts me on the floor every time she says it.
Does anyone “warsh their hands in the zinc” any place other than Bawlmer? (“In the wooder”)
Speaking of western PA, I was driving through the DuBois area on I-80 last december and stopped at a restaurant, where our server enthusiastically told us that the “Stillers” had just won their game.
I had READ that people sometimes called them the Stillers, but never heard it in the wild.
That road that runs along the freeway? If someone calls it a “feeder street”, that person is almost certainly from the Houston area. Everywhere else in the world it is either a frontage or service road.