"call a spade a spade"

[Charles Doyle]

Hey, Y'all--

All I said was "For some speakers of American English (by no means all of them) . . . ."

I made no claim about any other use or interpretation of the phrase not being "still alive and well"!!

--Charlie
_____________________________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:47:15 -0600
>From: Mark Davies <Mark_Davies at BYU.EDU>
>
>>> For some speakers of American English (by no means all of them), the word "spade" has lost all applications except for use as a derogatory racial designation.
>
>The data from the 360 million word Corpus of American English, 1990-2007 (www.americancorpus.org) suggests that the non-racially-motivated meaning of "spade" is still alive and well. The following are the most frequent nominal collocates for the lemma "spade", along with their frequency:
>
>ACE             40
>QUEEN           31
>GARDEN  19
>FORK            13
>SOIL            12
>SHOVELS 12
>KING            12
>HAND            10
>BAG             10
>DIRT            9
>CARDS           9
>SHOVEL  9
>STORES  8
>MEN             8
>BIT             8
>GROUND  8
>HANDBAG 8
>EARTH           7
>CARD            7
>BITS            7
>DESIGNER        6
>GAME            6
>LEATHER 6
>WORK            6
>TIME            6
>
>It looks like nearly all collocates refer to either the symbol on playing cards, or else the garden implement.
>
>Best,
>
>Mark Davies
>
>============================================
>Mark Davies
>Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
>Brigham Young University
>(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
>Web: davies-linguistics.byu.edu

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