creek / up shit's creek
I had no idea that British usage of creek was different from the use of the word in the rest of the English-speaking world until I was translating an Old Norse work (appropriately enough regarding the discovery and exploration of Vinland) and found that my Old Norse dictionary, produced in the UK, translated the word vágr as “bay, creek.” Unsure what was intended, a bay or a creek, I did some digging and discovered in British dialect the two words were synonyms. (Just to be clear, there is no etymological connection with the Old Norse vágr; creek is simply a translation.)
British and American pronunciation also differs. In British English, the vowel in creek is longer. (In linguistics, vowel length is not what you were taught when learning to read. A long vowel is just that—it takes longer to utter; there is no change in the vowel sound.) British pronunciation is generally /kriːk/, while American pronunciation is usually /krik/. (These are both “short” vowels in the sense you were probably taught in school.) In some American dialects the word is pronounced with a different vowel, /krɪk/ or “crick.”
The early history of the word is somewhat hazy, but it is probably from a Germanic root, probably the Old Norse kriki, meaning nook or bend, which would make it related to crook. English acquired the word from the French crique in the thirteenth century, and in Middle English the word was generally spelled with an < i >. At the same time the Anglo-Latin creca appears. In the sixteenth century, the word was borrowed again, this time from the Dutch kreke (modern Dutch kreek), and the spelling began to shift from < i > to < e >.
All these early uses, including those in French, Anglo-Latin, and Dutch are in the sense of an inlet, bay, or cove. One of its earliest appearances in English is in the c.1300 poem Havelok the Dane:
Hise ship he greythede wel inow;
He dede it tere an ful wel pike
That it ne doutede sond ne krike;
Therinne dide a ful god mast,
Stronge kables and ful fast,
Ores gode an ful god seyl—
Therinne wantede nouth a nayl,
That evere he sholde therinne do.
(His ship was supplied well enough;
He sealed it very well with tar and pitch
So it should fear neither sound nor creek;
Therein he installed a very good mast,
And strong cables, very fast,
Good oars and a very good sail—
It wanted nary a nail,
If he should ever need one.)
The sense of creek meaning a small river or stream appears first in North America, but it also is found in Australian and New Zealand speech. The sense is an extension of the sense of inlet or bay; European explorers would use the word to designate a cove, only to find it being fed by a river, and the name creek was transferred to it.
The stream sense appears by 1622 in Captain Nathaniel Butler’s “Unmasked Face of Our Colony in Virginia as It was in the Winter of the Year 1622.” Butler was governor of Bermuda and had a brief visit to the Jamestown colony that year. This is taken from an April 1623 transcription of Butler’s work in the The Records of the Virginia Company of London (I cannot find a version of the original that does not have modernized spelling and other editorial interventions):
Ther Howses are generally the worst yt euer I sawe ye meanest Cottages in England beinge euery way equall (if not superior) with ye moste of the best, And besides soe improuidently and scattringly are they seated one from an other as partly by their distance but especially by the interpositc[i]on of Creeks and Swamps as they call them they offer all aduantages to their sauadge enimys & are vtterly depriued of all suddaine recollection of themselues vppon any tearmes whatsoeuer.
And creek appears in this passage describing the English colony in New England appears in Philip Vincent’s 1637 account of the Pequot War:
In a word, they have built faire Townes of the lands owne materials, and faire Ships to, some where of are here to be seene on the Thames. They have overcome cold and hunger, are dispearsed securely in the Plantations sixty miles along the coast, and within the Lan also along some small Creekes and Rivers, and are assured of their peace by killing the Barbarians, better than our English Virginians were by being killed by them.
The phrase up shit’s creek is a nineteenth-century Americanism meaning in trouble, facing a predicament. The phrase is often bowdlerized by omitting the shit’s or, in early print appearances, replacing it with salt. The earliest known use of up shit’s creek that I know of is from 1868. It appears in the testimony of Augustus Lorins, a freedman, who was testifying about the 4 June 1868 murders of Solomon Dill, a US congressman from South Carolina, and a Nestor Ellison, a freedman. The men were probably murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Lorins’s testimony appears in the Secretary of War’s report to Congress for 1868:
On or about the 15th of May I went to Mr. Dill’s house. On my return to the plantation of Mr. E. Parker, he said to me: “Well, Augustus, what did Mr. Dill have to say?” I told him. “What else,” said Parker. I replied, I saw some pictures of Mr. Lincoln. He, Parker, then said, “well, our men put old Lincoln up Shit creek, and we’ll put old Dill up.”
One can be up shit’s creek without a paddle. Mentions of paddles in the phrase date to at least 1930.
Sources:
“At a Court Held for Virginia on Wedensday in the Afternoone the Last of Aprill 1623” (30 April 1623). The Records of the Virginia Company of London, vol. 2. Sarah Myra Kingsbury, ed. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906, 379–89 at 383. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018, s.v. creca, n. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. creek, n. , shit creek, n.
“Havelok the Dane.” In Four Romances of England. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds. University of Rochester: TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997, lines 707–14.
Message of the President of the United States and Accompanying Documents to the Two Houses of Congress. Third Session, Fortieth Congress. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1868, 480. Google Books.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. crike, n.(1).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. creek, n.1.
Vincent, Philip. A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England, Between the English and the Salvages. London: Marmaduke Parsons for Nathanael Butter and John Bellamie, 1637, 20. Archive.org.
Photo credit: US Army photo, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.
