auger

They pull out the auger and take a sample of the excavated dirt.

“I think I’m the only artistic director in the country wielding an ice auger,” she said of a tool resembling a giant corkscrew.

In both sun and rain, he repeatedly bores into the ground with a hand-held auger to gauge the quality of the soil, feeling, smelling and all but tasting the dirt.

Many drain cleaning jobs involve either snakes or long augers that slide down into the pipes and tear up or pull out debris.

For those inclined to believe that these childish provocations auger the end of the republic, please consider life in Congress in the decades before the Civil War.