Mary Glennon from Limerick recently had a chronic crick in her neck which even a visit to the heat of Lanzarote could not cure. It's all right now, she tells me. Is crick confined to Ireland, she asks?
No, it's in general colloquial use in England, where apart from being a pain in the neck or back, it may mean, figuratively, a fad, an unreasonable idea. In Lancashire, "he's got a crick in his head" is synonymous with "he's got a screw loose".
Crick is old and of uncertain origin. It is probably onomatopoeic, imitative of the sudden jerk the spasm causes, Oxford says. One of the oldest of our dictionaries, the 1440 Promptorum Parvulorum Sive Clericorum, defines crykke as spasmus. One of my favourite lexicons, John Florio's Italian-English A Worlde of Wordes, written for James the First's Queen, Anne of Denmark, has: "Adolomato: troubled with a cricke or wrinch in the necke or backe." That the word is from the Irish creach, plunder, is nonsense. It's strange indeed that the old and popular crick has been relegated to dialect status.
Another c word, creel, is the subject of a letter from Mary Gladney from Carlow. A creel is a large wicker basket without a lid, used to transport turf or potatoes or seaweed. It can also mean a turf-cart with open, barred, or grated sides; or a crate for placing on the body of a cart to hold turf. Patrick Kennedy, in The Banks of the Boro (a Wexford river) wrote in 1867: "He lifted the creel and made her sit on the soft hay in the body of the cart." Jane Barlow refers to a Connacht creel, a basket, in her 1892 Bogland: "You maybe wouldn't object to the lads lavin' you a few creels of turf." Origin? Oxford rejects the theory that its from Old Irish criol, chest, coffer. It offers instead the Old French greille, which may have had an unattested variant creille, from Latin craticula, fine hurdle work.
John Watson from Delgany has the word scran as meaning both loose change and unmarketable fish, as well as scraps of food. This is the scran that's to be found in the minor curse, "bad scran to you!" I note that the second edition of Oxford has discarded the theory, once put forward in this column, that scran is from Icelandic skran, refuse, rubbish. This is probably coincidental, it says. It offers no alternative.