Rebecca in Jackson, Tennessee, says her mother-in-law would describe people unwilling to work as not work brickle. The word brickle has long meant “brittle,” is probably a word of Germanic origin and an etymological relative of the word break. The...
A Indianapolis, Indiana, woman remembers that her Kentucky-born grandfather used to say that a lazy person wasn’t very work-brickle. The dialectal term work-brickle is a variant of work-brittle, which, in the late 19th century, described someone who...
