Heard on The judges: "Ripping and running"

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, I'm not at all familiar with the form, "rip and run," in any use
at all, only with the form, "ripping and running" and that only
because m grandmother regularly used it. In effect, from 1949, the
last year in which I actually lived in Marshall, till the publication
of the book, Ripping and Running, in 1973, the phrase has been dead to
me, tlli I began to hear it on The Judges, relatively recently.

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 9:51 AM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
> a post-hole spade

My grandfather had one of these. He used it to dig post-holes for his
various strings of chicken-wire fencing on he family estate. A quick
glance into Google reveals a cite for the term from 1860 and GImages
shows me that there's more than one kind of tool referred to by that
name. Granddad had a now museum-grade spade of the
double-handle-double-blade type also known - according to something
that I read somewhere somewhen, probably more than sixty years ago -
as a (_clam-shell_) post-hole _digger_.

I've also *seen* the single-bladed kind. But I didn't realize that it
was also a post-hole spade, it being a tool whose use clearly requires
a level of skill and musculature that I, being somewhat averse to
manual labor as a form of relaxation(!), have managed to avoid
acquiring. Hence, till now, I hadn't realized what is immediately
obvious, once it's been pointed outL that the otherwise-ordinary
spades with the long, slender blades are *also* post-hole spades.

In GImages, there's a diagram of the difference in appearance between
a post hole dug with a post-hole spade and one dug with a (post-hole?)
*shovel*.

The only way that I can make sense of this is to assume that, for the
writer, there's no intrinsic distinction between a spade and a shovel.
I'm well aware of what would happen if I tried to shovel coal with a
spade or to dig a hole with a shovel. Of course, it could be done.
But, why?

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org