"call a spade a spade"

[Mark Davies]

>> 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

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Mark Davies
Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
Brigham Young University
(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
Web: davies-linguistics.byu.edu

** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
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