Heard on The judges: "Ripping and running"

[victor steinbok]

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 7:06 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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.
>


One of the hits that came up in GB was Collins Dictionary of Slang--for "rip
and run", not for "ripping and running"--with the lemma (doing it from
memory, I saved it on a different computer) suggesting "to move about
aimlessly" or something like that. Seems to be a related meaning to "ripping
and running" that you cited. A number of citations are clearly linked to
Texas and Louisiana, although, of course, most are difficult to place from a
GB snippet.


>
> 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_.
>

That sounds exactly right to me. I've seen/used the double-bladed variety,
although not all had double handles. Not sure about the single-bladed
digger, though.


>
> 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?
>


Certainly for most ESL people, the difference may escape their attention.
Most people I know refer to everything that has a large metal blade--curved
or flat--as a "shovel". Wanna dig? Go grab a "shovel". The only item that I
can think of that's consistently referred to as "spade" is the
survivalist-type, short-handled (about 40 cm long) multi-tool that has a
digging blade--the type that's sometimes associated with the Soviet/Russian
army. So the diagram caption is not surprising to me. Going the other
way--referring to a shovel as a "spade" /would/ be surprising to me.


VS-)

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