Spadework

[ensiform]

As "spade" is rarely used in America outside the realm of playing cards, I would venture that "spadework" is very rarely used in the USA, if at all.  Note the buzzword of the previous stimulus package: "shovel-ready" projects.  No one would say "spade-ready."

[anonsi]

Actually, I would say a spade as a tool is fairly common here, too (I live in Iowa in the US). But I would have to agree that the term "spadework" is rarely, if ever, used. At least I had never heard of it before. I managed to get the word, but was surprised when it was actually accepted.

As a side note, a spade and a shovel are two different things to me. Are they the same for you? To me, a shovel has a blunt edge, and a spade has a pointed edge and is usually fairly narrow. It looks like Wikipdia agrees with me, somewhat, too:

The term shovel is sometimes used interchangeably with spade, but shovels generally are broad-bottomed and better suited for moving loose materials, whereas spades tend to be pointed for use as a digging tool.

Spade:


Shovel:


And while we're speaking of shovels...I spent over an hour today using one to scoop up snow from our sidewalks. We used our snowblower for the driveway, but our sidewalks have stairs to them. We got around a foot of snow!

[ensiform]

I would agree with this distinction, and I think most Americans might if you presented it to them this way.  However, I'm inclined to think that the distinction is not one that most Americans consider at all; they would just call both items a shovel as a matter of course.  They would not use the term spade as a matter of course.

[rogue_mother]

It is often said that we who live at Inside the Beltway are out of touch with the rest of America, and this seems to be one more example.  RF is a gardener who has both a shovel AND a spade. However, spadework does not necessarily refer to such implements. Hereabouts "doing the spadework" is a general expression that means doing the preliminary preparations for an involved task. I would have thought that people in Outside the Beltway also used this expression, but perhaps I am wrong about this.

[birdy]

As an apartment dweller, I don't have any current use for either a spade or shovel, but I certainly know the distinction from the tools we had at my parents' home.

And I agree, R_M, that the current use of the term "spadework" has only a metaphorical relationship to the digging implements.

[Alan W]

Since this thread was started, nearly 4 years ago, spadework has come up twice more as the 9-letter word of a daily puzzle (with different mandatory letters). So perhaps by now everybody has become familiar with the word, even if they weren't before. Still, I'd like to resolve the question of whether it's really a common word.

The evidence from the News on the Web corpus doesn't support the idea that the word is noticeably less often used in America than in Britain. But what it does show is that the word isn't used all that frequently in either country: United States, 0.03 times per million words; Great Britain, 0.04 times per million. Generally it is used in the figurative sense of preparatory tasks. For example, a 2015 CBS News item quoted a State Department spokesman as saying, "But we do believe through a lot of hard diplomatic spadework that we have made progress." I did see one story from the British Telegraph where the word was used about people digging up their gardens.

I would have thought that the word is quite common, but it looks like I'm wrong. In any case, wherever there is doubt, I prefer to come down on the side of classing a word as rare. This applies especially to a 9-letter seed word. So spadework will be treated as rare in future - which means, in practice, that you won't be seeing it again.

Possibly the reason I thought the word was well known is that it was something of a favourite of P G Wodehouse, dozens of whose books I have consumed over the years. Who, having read it, could forget this passage from Jeeves in the Offing?

'I was looking for a mouse.'
'A mouse?' she said, 'What do you mean?'
Well, of course, if she didn't know what a mouse was, there was evidently a good deal of tedious spadework before us...

Here are some other uses of the word by Wodehouse, that I could locate by googling. There may be others.

Last night Chuffy wounded her deepest feelings, and it's going to take a lot of spadework to bring her round.

It seemed to me that what you might call the preliminary spadework had been most satisfactorily attended to...

'I see what you mean. You will sort of pave the way, as it were.'
'That's right. Spadework.'

Preliminary spadework must be put in.

[cmh]

Is the phrase "he/she calls a spade a b....y shovel" world wide or just British? (In Yorkshire we use this usually in an admiring way as we like a straight talker!")

[Hobbit]

My Dad was a Yorkshireman & it was an expression he used & so do I even though I'm a feeble southerner! I don't know why but I always just assumed it was a "Yorkshireism"

[pat]

Is the phrase "he/she calls a spade a b....y shovel" world wide or just British? (In Yorkshire we use this usually in an admiring way as we like a straight talker!")

I reckon I ought to come and live in Yorkshire then. I'm always getting in trouble for saying what I think!

[nineoaks]

For What (Little) It's Worth,

Sorry to see 'spadework' become rare on Chi. It is familiar to me in the sense described by RM. sigh. I've noticed that I tend to favor 'common' words staying 'common.' I enjoy exploring the richness of our language and think that it's just the extreme outward edges of the language ('Scrabble words' and highly specialized terms) that should be considered rare.

Best Wishes to All,

nineoaks

[Les303]

[quote
I reckon I ought to come and live in Yorkshire then. I'm always getting in trouble for saying what I think!
[/quote]

And i reckon that you should come to Queensland Pat , because here ,we simply call a " spade a spade " regardless of the consequences.
'

[pat]

And i reckon that you should come to Queensland Pat , because here ,we simply call a " spade a spade " regardless of the consequences.

That might just be on the cards, Les. At the moment I have provisional bookings on two back-to-back tours in Oz next October, one taking in Perth and Darwin, and the other down the east coast, including the splendid O'Reilly's. They're provisional because the price hasn't yet been finalized and due to the dreadful referendum result and the subsequent plummet in the value of the pound, the cost might be prohibitive. I'm probably looking in the region of £15-18k when the flights are factored in. Around £1,600 of that is just the single room supplement! But Australia is top of my bucket list so ...

[Les303]

Good luck Pat , i do hope that you can manage to pull it off as i am sure it would be a most memorable & enjoyable trip for you.