Pylimitics

There’s an old saying “up a creek without a paddle.” It means you’re in trouble — maybe fairly serious difficulty. You’ll sometimes see a shorter version, “up a creek,” which means the same thing. But you’ll only hear this expression in the US (or possibly in Australia and New Zealand), where a “creek” is a small river or stream. Small, that is, but apparently big enough for some sort of boat, and big enough for you to be in trouble if you’re in the boat but dropped your paddle overboard. Size matters in these situations. But back to “creek.” 

In England, a “creek” means a bay or inlet — especially one with a harbor or dock — and it’s had that meaning since at least the 1200s, when its use is recorded in the poem Havelok the Dane. The usage differed in the New World very early, where it was used in a 1637 essay to mean a river. 

Nobody knows how the word “creek” came to mean something different when people left England to settle in the rest of the world. But the phrase “up a creek without a paddle” has an interesting twist in its history. Its earliest variant is actually “up shit creek,” which was first recorded in, of all places, the Annual Report to Congress by the Secretary of War in 1868. “Up a creek without a paddle” is a later version, and it wasn’t until about 1930 that it paddled (or drifted) its way to the rest of us.