Can you excavate a hole?

Is that proper useage, or is the excavation the hole?

Excavation creates a hole. Saying “excavating a hole” is a bit like saying “evacuating a vacuum”.

Ugh… Why utilize a five-dollar word, when you can use a nice little word like “dig?”

Maybe you could excavate a hole filled with something, unless it was filled with ground exactly like the ground all around it.

Or “use”. :stuck_out_tongue:

Guess my joke on that was more subtle than anticipated. :rolleyes:

I say, I say, I say, what gets bigger the more you take out of it?

(We can make jokes in GQ when the question’s been answered, right?)

Actually, looking at dictionary.com we get:

2 would apply to a hole, though this may not always have been good usage. I agree this normally worse than dig. What is the context? I’d say use dig unless you have a good reason to use excavate. Excavate carried connotations of a large operation, for instance.

4 might apply, eg. if someone digs a hole, leaves for 1000 yrs to be filled in by dirt different from the original dirt, then someone discovers this.

It was just a line I heard someone use. It sounded wrong, but when I tried to explain why it was very hard to do. So I started wondering if maybe it was allowable. Seems like by stretching things you can make it work but it is not good word useage.

I’m a geotechnical engineer. We typically call anything that was dug by a machine ‘excavated’. The usage is: “We excavated the soil.” The material that you removed was excavated. The hole is the product of excavation.

I thought this was going to be an Archaeology thread.

Of course you can excavate a hole-
there is nearly always some sort of fill, which sometimes contains datable artifacts.


Sci-fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html

FWIW (from Cool Hand Luke):

Boss Paul: That ditch is Boss Kean’s ditch. And I told him that dirt in it’s your dirt. What’s your dirt doin’ in his ditch?
Luke: I don’t know, Boss.
Boss Paul: You better get in there and get it out, boy.

That isn’t a hot-water heater in your basement, either.

Adopting Shades theory that once the OP has been answered we can diverge you may like this (true honest) story - although I may get some of the fine detail wrong the gist was:

A friend of mine works for British Sugar, turning beet into refined sugar. The process produces a lot of waste heat so they have to find other uses for it. During the boom to intranet everything in their company they put that project teams work on their intranet inviting constructive input from the general staff. Little did they allow for the Brits being unable to avoid a joke for long…

The capital project proposal was to create a market gardening joint venture and pump the waste heat in to the green houses.

First contribution - “My father had green houses and he heard heating them with the rays of the sun very effective.”

Second contribution (catching on quick) - “I heard digging holes and filling them with straw generates heat, that might be useful if you wheeled the green houses over them”

Projects Boss (trying to keep order) - “Look, as long as I am head of capital projects there’ll be no project for which the spec is a hole in the ground”

Third contributor - “Bob, you’ve got to realise we are trying to reposition ourselves as a can-do company. Don’t think of them as holes in the ground so much as opportunities waiting to be filled!”

(Capital Projects work was taken of their intranet later that afternoon).