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We had great fun with Ponder Avenue last year (thanks, BYB)
and just now, WW posted in Weekly Themes:
My Granddaddy Percy used to keep his minnows in some kind of creek can on Rocky Run. Whenever he went fishing, he'd go to the run, pull up that creek can...
We have done bodies of water in bits and pieces, Bights, and runs, but there are so many.. and Bean gave us some oceangraphic terms, but what about bodies of water as a theme.. from wet lands to oceans, and every thing in between?
a WW, a run is a branch of a creek? Smaller? or bigger?
and some words Slough= is slow to rhyme with cow? or slew to rhyme with stew?
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Carpal Tunnel
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slough> ...or sluff to rhyme with.. oh, never mind,
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veteran
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Slough= is slow to rhyme with cow? or slew to rhyme with stew? Britspeak: I'd say the first, rhyming with cow. I had a temporary brainstorm and thought it should rhyme with slow or doe ( a deer, a female deer...  ), but then realised I was thinking of the fruit, a sloe. Do you get them in the US? We make sloe gin, which at its best is much like the wisniowka (cherry vodka) discussed elsewhere. Slough rhyming with cow is also the name of an English town renowned as being the back end of beyond. With no justification at all, of course. [po-faced] FiskEdit: after a check on Merriam-Webster, I've found I'm almost completely wrong on all fronts! I was thinking of sloughing off a skin, but that should always be pronounced sluff. And the watery meaning is slaw. D'oh.
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newbie
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In East Texas "slough" rhymes with stew. It is a "U" in the bank of a lake where a creek runs in.
Robert
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Carpal Tunnel
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swale - a relatively small siightly swampy area, with no trees or bushes, or grass, usually various reeds, and in some instances wild cranberries. I actually stepped on tail feathers of a hen pheasant in one. When she squawked it really startled me. We were there to pick the cranberries.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Crick / creek.
A creek is a very small river. You usually use crick instead of creek in the expression "up the crick without a paddle" meaning your are in deep doo-doo with no way out.
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On an other note Shona brought up sloe gin. I've heard of that but there is one type of gin I don't know the English term for.
Bols is Gros gin (Big gin) in French. Do you know what that type of gin is called?
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Carpal Tunnel
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swale - a relatively small siightly swampy area
A definition more common here, where our land is very flat and hence of very poor drainage, is the man-made swale for drainage purposes. Per bartleby:
swale 3. A shallow troughlike depression that carries water mainly during rainstorms or snow melts.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Keiva: you are unwelcome in AWADtalk.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Of troy, you questioned:
"a WW, a run is a branch of a creek? Smaller? or bigger? "
I'd say a creek, run, and branch could all be the same size, from small to large, around Dinwiddie. Also, rills would be the same.
However, I would say that creeks and runs would go from small-sized to very large, whereas a branches and rills would tend to remain on the small to medium size.
I've seen very narrow creeks, for instance. And Rocky Run isn't very large at all in places. Rocky Run, everybody around here would agree, is a creek. People would speak of branches off the creek, say, "Oh, that branch off Rocky Run lies on his back fifty." But the same branch could be referred to, by the farmer on whose land it lies, as "the creek out back."
Then there are springs, little bits of streams around here. We had once here a little spring that my dad had dammed up, and now there's a four and a half acre pond out back fed by the spring. But nobody would say a creek, branch, or run fills the pond.
There are long histories of families who came to settle this place, mostly Scots, English, and Irish. I suppose each group brought its names for creeks and that's why we have such a variety of reference here.
Nobody here, by the way, says, "crick" for "creek" unless for humorous purposes.
Boat regards,
WordWater
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Carpal Tunnel
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I'd say a creek, run, and branch could all be the same size, from small to large, around Dinwiddie. Also, rills would be the same. However, I would say that creeks and runs would go from small-sized to very large, whereas a branches and rills would tend to remain on the small to medium size.bartleby indicates regional variations in usage in the eastern US: Terms for "a small, fast-flowing stream" vary throughout the eastern United States especially. Speakers in the eastern part of the Lower North (including Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and southern Pennsylvania) use the word run. Speakers in the Hudson Valley and Catskills, the Dutch settlement areas of New York State, may call such a stream a kill. Brook has come to be used throughout the Northeast. Southerners refer to a branch, and throughout the northern United States the term is crick, a variant of creek.http://www.bartleby.com/61/59/R0345900.html, at end Around here, branch refers not to the size of a stream but to its configuration. When a stream (whether a river or a creek) splits into two roughly-equal sub-streams as one travels upstream, each is called a branch. Thus, one has the north and south branches of the Chicago River, and similarly, the north and soutch pranches of many creeks. When a brach similarly splits, each part (or the smaller part) is called a fork. I'd think a river is distinguished from all of these term in that it must be big enough to navigate, at least in a substanital part of its length of a substantial part of the year. But I can't find any source to support that distinction.
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