[Ads-l] A spade is not a shovel.
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Jul 31 06:08:21 UTC 2017
> “shovel” is US for “spade.”
Is that true of all 320,000,000 Americans, except for me, do you think? Of
course, you are relying upon the authority of the Web and there's no
arguing with that. Perhaps the distinction will die with me, in about five
years.
On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 12:05 AM, Barretts Mail <mail.barretts at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Despite my mom teaching me the difference about four decades ago, they’re
> all shovels to me. Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shovel <
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shovel>) says that “shovel” is US for
> “spade.” BB
>
> > On 30 Jul 2017, at 19:36, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > A bunch of guys on TV with spades are calling them "shovels." Aren't you
> > supposed to call a spade a "spade"? Or is the distinction between a spade
> > and a shovel being lost, at least among city-folk, since no one uses
> spades
> > to dig ditches or uses shovels to shovel coal, anymore?
> >
> > --
> > -Wilson
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
--
-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
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