If you read a historical document, like the Declaration of Independence, you’ll notice the capitalization of lot of words we don’t ordinarily capitalize today, and then not consistently: “Men,” for example, is not capitalized in the phrase “all men are created equal,” while it is capitalized in the phrase “Governments are instituted among Men.”
Capitalization used to be fairly haphazard in English before the first grammar books aimed at lay people were widely distributed, in the mid-18th century. Sometimes nouns were capitalized for effect, sometimes they were capitalized for reasons we can’t discern today.
But today, we know that if a noun is capitalized, it’s a proper noun, or the name of a specific thing. If you have some “Coke,” for example, you’re indulging in a soft drink. If you have some “coke,” though, you’re indulging in something entirely different. (To be fair, “coke” is also a soft drink, mostly in the South.)
That capitalized-or-not debate comes into play in the folk expression “If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.”
The expression has been around long enough that there have been many plays, songs, and even TV shows that use it, some with variations (“God Willin’,” “da Creek,” etc.).
Of course, because we capitalize most words in titles, “Creek” is almost always capitalized there. But when it’s capitalized solely in the expression itself, it changes the meaning significantly.
“If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise,” without capitalization, seems simple enough, if not grammatical: “I’ll see you next year, if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise” means I’ll see you next year, unless something intervenes, like an act of God or the local body of water floods.
As a folk expression, using “don’t” seems fine: Many people use “don’t” as a singular when “doesn’t” would be more proper. That “don’t” is particularly common in Southern dialect.
But look what happens when you capitalize “creek”: “Lord Willing and the Creek don’t rise.” In today’s English, “Creek” becomes a proper noun, the name of a specific thing. And “Creek” happens to be the name of an American Indian tribe.
Thus we have a dispute about the origin of the phrase itself.
The Creek Indians, also known as the Muscogee, lived mostly in what is now Georgia, Florida, and Alabama and were often at war with settlers and other tribes. (There is a branch in Oklahoma as well, as one might expect from the Muscogee name.) As part of the attempts to “civilize” Native Americans after the Revolutionary War, George Washington appointed a former Congressman from North Carolina named Benjamin Hawkins as the superintendent of all the Indian tribes in the South, primarily the Creek, to teach agricultural and other “civilized” customs. For the first few years under Hawkins, the Creek were quiet. But after 1812, they became more restive. Supposedly, President Thomas Jefferson recalled Hawkins to Washington, and he wrote that he would be there “If the good Lord is willing and the Creek don’t rise.”
In other words, in this version, the expression is grammatical, because “Creek” is a collective noun, like “people,” and so needs the plural “don’t.”
Some snags in this version are that no one can find any written evidence that Hawkins said such a thing, and, even if he did, he might have capitalized Creek just because of the idiosyncrasies of the time and so might have meant “if the water doesn’t rise.”
In 2003, Merriam-Webster said that “Creek” was pronounced “crick,” as a Southern or rural dialect might pronounce “creek,” muddying those waters as well. But M-W also debunks the Native American connection.
Nevertheless, the “Creek” version persists, with vehement defenders and detractors, proving again that the easy explanation sometimes isn’t enough.
Merrill Perlman managed copy desks across the newsroom at the New York Times, where she worked for twenty-five years. Follow her on Twitter at @meperl.