South Jersey

[Jersey Jeff]

I have relatives in Seaside Park and if you go by sports teams, the display of Yankees, Mets, Giants and Jets paraphernalia in the Seaside/Toms River area definitely outnumbers stuff for the Phillies and Eagles, IMHO.

 

[Spung-Man]

J-M

You got me thinking about crick, which is the way I learned it too. Apparently the pronunciation might be a Swedish artifact. Crick for creek was a fairly recent addition to the English language (c.1500s). According to the Oxford English Dictionary online (2012):

The form crick resembles Swedish dial krik bend, nook, corner, creek, cove (Rietz)... but is probably an English shortening of crique , crike . In many parts of U.S. crick is the common pronunciation of creek in the sense ‘stream’​

​

OEM continues about "creek,"

Probably the name was originally given by the explorers of a river to the various inlets or arms observed to run out of it, and of which only the mouths were seen in passing; when at a later period these ‘creeks’ were explored, they were often found to be tributaries of great length; but they retained the designation originally given, and ‘creek’ thus received an application entirely unknown in Great Britain.​

As for ask, OEM states:

The true representative of the orig. áscian was the s.w. and w.midl. ash , esh , also written esse (compare æsce ash n.1, wæsc(e)an wash n.), now quite lost. Acsian, axian, survived in ax, down to nearly 1600 the regular literary form, and still used everywhere in midl. and southern dialects, though supplanted in standard English by ask, originally the northern form. ​

S-M

 

[Trailwalker]

I've always considered it to be like this:

North Jersey: From the NY border down to the Raritan River
Central NJ: From the Raritan River south to I-195.
South Jersey: Everything south of 195.

Mostly so I can consider myself to live in South Jersey.

This is exactly where I land on this. I grew up in the southern area of Howell Township and in grade school we had families who we referred to as hicks or pineys. "Them piney Dennis brothers live on a boat up on stilts back in the woods surrounded by big dogs everywhere." We could get neither NY or Filthydelphia radio stations to come in clearly. When we moved to Toms River, I really felt like we were transported to the south. This was back in the mid '70's though.