Son of a...

So I'm taking TMA 121, Voice and Diction for acting majors. We study the International Phonetic Alphabet and are learning how to speak the Standard American dialect. To those of you who don't know how that's any different from normal speaking think of hearing Shakespeare performed. The actors don't sound like normal people, they sound kind of British. At the same time though they sound too American to be British. There you have it Standard American.

Well on Wednesday one of my fellow MDT friends in the class brought up the real reason we were all taking Voice and Diction. (Yeah, I know it's required for the Music Dance Theatre major but that's small beans when compared to this trying argument.) The girl--whose name also happens to be Emily-- (Welcome to BYU... where if you don't have five brothers and sisters and at least on of them is named Emily or Ryan you should transfer.) dropped the loaded question. "So if we're learning the original form of speech, or the proper way of speaking... how does one pronounce c-r-e-e-k?" A silence fell over the classroom. You may think I'm kidding but everyone held rapt attention. Unfortunately our teacher, who is red-headed, Mormon version of Jim Carey was being entertained by someone else. I dug out my International-Phonetic-Alphabet-Standard-American-Whatever-the-heck-else dictionary to see what the authorities said.

While flipping through the pages I couldn't help but remember sixth grade. I had a different teacher on Fridays for some weird reason that takes too long to explain. Mrs. Lavelle was an angel when compared to the regular teacher. Unlike the she-who-will-not-be-named, Mrs. Lavelle knew how to relate to us. During English class one day the creek/crick argument came up and she settled it on spot.

"This is the way I look at it. Do we have a town in our community called Beech Creek or Bitch Crick?" To sixth graders who had just started getting the flavor for cuss words on their tongues she taught us a lesson in proper English we would never forget.

So that's what I was thinking as I was looking up what the dictionary said. Here is the passage that I found:

"Creek" prounounced creek and crick, crick is much less frequently used in the South, but appears to be the native form in the North and East. Creek, originally a North British dialect form, is still native in the Appalachians. According to Horn's, Jordan's, and Luick's Historical English Grammars, crick represents the original word, later altered to creek and then spelt c-r-e-e-k. Crike is the much earlier recorded form. At first creek was not a spelling pronunciation, but the spelling creek doubtless encouraged it's spread. Luick thinks that American crick represents the normal Standard English development.

I couldn't believe it. All these years I grew up thinking I was better that the back woods Pennsylvania kids because I said creek. Turns out they were right and Mrs. Lavelle was wrong. I live near Bitch Crick.