{"id":933,"date":"2009-02-26T22:21:31","date_gmt":"2009-02-27T02:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=933"},"modified":"2009-02-26T22:30:41","modified_gmt":"2009-02-27T02:30:41","slug":"readying-the-shovel-an-operetta-in-two-parts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2009\/02\/26\/readying-the-shovel-an-operetta-in-two-parts\/","title":{"rendered":"Readying the shovel : an operetta in two parts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t like people who throw about new terms as though they were old.  It has the smell of name-dropping without any of the potential for <em>gossip<\/em>.  So I&#8217;ve downgraded my opinion of people I&#8217;ve found using the phrase &#8220;<strong>shovel-ready<\/strong>&#8221; in recent weeks.  It has reached such a state of malaise that today I went in search of the origins of the term.<\/p>\n<p>To my surprise (but not yours, astute reader), the term originated with the owners of <a href=\"http:\/\/shovelready.com\"><strong>shovelready.com<\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0 who have used it for the past decade to refer to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gorr.state.ny.us\/SR_welcome.html\">economic development projects in upstate new york<\/a> that have &#8220;<em>worked proactively with the State to address all major permitting issues, <span class=\"red\"><strong>prior<\/strong><\/span> to a business expressing interest in the location<\/em>&#8220;.<\/p>\n<p>This became a designation used cross New York state, from where it no doubt came to the attention of its senators and later Obama.\u00a0 One might also take its popularity as a reflection on the excellence of the site design at <em>shovelready.com<\/em> &#8212; which I would guess drew Clinton and Obama and their aides to discuss it.\u00a0 So <strong>congratulations<\/strong> are in order to the underappreciated web designers at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalgrid.com\/\">National Grid<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t like people who throw about new terms as though they were old. It has the smell of name-dropping without any of the potential for gossip. So I&#8217;ve downgraded my opinion of people I&#8217;ve found using the phrase &#8220;shovel-ready&#8221; in recent weeks. It has reached such a state of malaise that today I went [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-f3","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}