The lot has been grubbed. What is that?
Thanks!
All (the lot) of the food has been eaten (grubbed) in Brit slang???
Tree stumps have been removed from a plot of land to facilitate construction.
That’s not British slang. Grub is a noun meaning food, but not a verb meaning “to eat”.
the landscaping use came to mind first for me. a grubbing hoe is a narrower sharp thick bladed hoe used to cut tree and brush roots and to cut and raise sod.
What Kimstu said.
“Clearing and grubbing” are terms commonly used for civil engineering site work. “Clearing” refers to cutting down trees and brush, but leaving the surface of the ground undisturbed. After a site has been cleared, then, all of the tree stumps and root balls are still in place.
“Grubbing” refers to removing all of the plant growth below grade, including tree stumps and root balls. After this has been done, though, there is nothing to prevent the soil from being eroded away, so you have to get measures to prevent this in place before grubbing. In particular, you don’t want eroded soil leaving the site and getting into waterways, so you have to get measures such as silt fences and haybales installed on the downgradient perimeter of the site.
You may well be right, but I know many people (not necc. Brits) who commonly say “Lets go grub” when they are heading off to lunch.
It is a very widespread slang term around the USA, if not the UK…
I bet you googled that.
If this is a joke, I am not sure I get it…
The joke is surely your post above, which he quoted. I know you’re in Utah, so I’ll try and take that into account here, but I seriously, seriously doubt the veracity of your statement re: “let’s go grub” ever being uttered in America on purpose as a form of “let’s go eat”.
I guess that would make you wrong then…
The first Thanksgiving after meeting my gf, I was invited to family dinner. I guess in an attempt to be gracious, I was offered the opportunity to “say grace”. Everyone folded hands and lowered their heads. You coulda heard a pin drop. I cleared my throat and said, “Rub-a-dub-dub. Thanks for the grub”.
Luckily, everyone there had a sense of humor. Five years later, they still tell the tale, smiling and laughing all the while.
I think it’s a play on another noun-turned-verb; a response to Colo
Dr. Gary N. Underwood’s article entitled “Razorback Slang” (American Speech 50, 1975, pp. 50-69) appears to contradict your incredulity:
It doesn’t seem at all surprising to me that such a phrase in thirty-odd years would morph from the form “to grub up” in campus slang to the form “to grub” in a wider context. And indeed, if you do google “Let’s go grub”, you’ll find many attestations of it.
That said, though, there’s AFAICT no question that the OP’s phrase “The lot has been grubbed” refers to digging stumps (and root balls, as robby noted) out of building lots, not to grubbing as in eating.
I’m not sure whether the slang verb “to grub” meaning “to eat” even has any recognized past passive participle form.
Kimstu, thank you for your help—I am not too savvy when it comes to that sort of thing, and it was thoughtful of you to check it out for me.
That said, this is just another silly SDMB tangent, one that I was afterall initially wrong about, and certainly one that I am not emotionally invested in—If good ol’ Snowboarder Bo dosent believe that I have indeed heard phrases like “Where should we go grub lunch” or “Let’s go grub some Del Taco, I am starving” on MANY occasions during my misspent youth, well then, I suppose that I will just have to find the strength to live with the heartbreak of his incredulity… 
I was hoping the term meant “covered in grubs”. 
No, the standard term for that condition is “Kimstu’s garden”. Sigh.
I had never run into “to grub” meaning “to eat”, though the noun “grub” as slang for “food; a meal” has been in my vocabulary for over 50 years. But I’m chiming in to say that “clearing and grubbing” in the sense robby indicates was a common element in cost estimates prepred by the civil engineering firm our grantwriting consulting firm worked with, with the meaning he outlines – site preparation, “clearing” being the removal of objects protruding above ground level (trees, shrubs, fence posts, etc.) along with leveling the site for construction, and “grubbing” being the removal of that below ground surface which might interfere with construction: tree and bush roots, yes., but also dealing with an underground tank, no-longer-functional well, etc., which could increase C&G costs significantly. Robby didn’t mention that, so I’m not sure if it was their private usage of an expanded definition of C&G to include them with it, or simply something he didn’t find necessary to mention.
Kimstu, thanks for the clarification, but I can’t see any more than the first page of that report. I don’t have a JSTOR account.
I know that I’ve never heard the word used that way, despite living in many different parts of the US, hence my initial doubt.
I have never heard of clearing and grubbing to include anything other than natural vegetable materials.
In particular, “clearing” does not typically include removal of fence posts, nor does it include grading the site. “Grubbing” most certainly does not typically include removal of underground storage tanks (USTs).
Clearing typically includes “cutting or otherwise removing all trees, saplings, brush and vines, windfalls, logs and trees lying on the ground, dead trees and stubs more than 1 foot high above the ground surface (but not their stumps), trees which have been partially uprooted by natural or other causes (including their stumps), and other vegetable matter such as shags, sawdust, bark, refuse, and similar materials.”
Grubbing typically includes “completely removing all stumps and roots to a depth of 18 inches.”