Thanks your for the information, Azizi. Like mg, I would never have considered some of those expressions to be "racial code words". I have used "spadework" all my life to refer to making adequate preparations for something, and I played pickup basketball myself in college. I guess "shuck and jive" has an African-American background but, as a person who has been light pinkish-beige all my life, I can honestly say that it has always been an synonym for "screwing around" in my subculture, regardless of the skin color or ethnic background of the person who was doing it.