


New sounds will make your gunfight more enjoyable. Prairies, and it came out “crappé.” Then, Palmer figures, speakers shortened the “a” before the double consonant to rhyme with “happy.” The same rule applies to “apple.” Which, to my mind, is an all-American fruit and a pretty solid blow supporting my rhymes-with-happy position.Tired of terrible vanilla weapons sounds? Then this mod is exactly for you. According to the OED, the first known instance of the word in printed form was in the 1861 issue of a magazine called Sportsman W.

Palmer says that English speakers in Northern regions of the United States first pronounced the word as they would have likely heard it: “crop-ay,” which morphed at some point into today’s variant, pronounced “crop-ee.”īut Southerners might have picked up the word from written sources. As Palmer explains it, word pronunciations often depend on whether the word was first seen written, or first heard. The fish was originally found in more Northern regions and was then transplanted widely across the country. Julie Palmer, a historical linguist and the nation’s leading scholar on the various pronunciations of “crappie.” Okay, her actual gig is Associate Professor of Modern Languages at Hampden-Sydney College, in a particularly crappie-rich region of south-central Virginia.Īccording to Palmer, the original name of this bespeckled problem-causer is the French crapet, meaning “rock bass,” and that term likely would have spawned the French Canadian crappé. To sort things out required a deep dive into etymology, and for that I needed to ring in with Dr. So how are we common perch-jerkers supposed to come to a consensus? Not so fast, saith the Oxford English Dictionary. Rhymes with “happy,” decrees the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. But in more Western and Northern states, and along the fringes of the South, “crop-pee” rules the day. Some say “crappie” so it rhymes with “happy.” Others pronounce it so it rhymes with “poppy.” Down he-yah in the Southern climes, most folks go with the former despite its potty-mouth connotations. There are at least two accepted pronunciations of the word.

What’s really confounding isn’t how to catch the fish, but something more primary: how to pronounce their dang name. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
