"Calling a Spade a Spade" - Origin?

[Spoke]

I have always wondered about the phrase “He believes in calling a spade a spade.”

It is a very handy phrase to describe someone who speaks frankly, but I have always been sort of self-conscious about using it, because of its possible racist connotations. Does anyone out there know the origin of this phrase? Is the word “spade” being used in its racist sense? Speculation welcome, but I hope someone has the definitive answer.

Next thread: Can a pot call a kettle black in a PC world?

[Cowboy_Greg]

From Evan Morris’ Word Detective web site (which I heartily recommend to the etymologically curious), we get this explanation:

Dear Evan: In the spirit of your recent explanation of “rule of thumb” perhaps you might like to address the following: “Call a spade a spade.” A friend of mine from Britain used a variant of this expression, changing an aspect of it in the interests of humor, noting that in not mincing his words, he “calls a spade a bloody shovel.” His sense was that the phrase had its origins in confusion over what to call a digging implement. I don’t think the phrase is quite that innocent. My understanding is that in fact “calling a spade a spade” harkens back to Civil War America, when a person’s freedom turned on whether or not the establishment considered one Black or not. Inter-racial liaisons were not uncommon, and so mulatto children were reasonably common. The White establishment was loathe to allow itself to be “diluted” with “impure blood,” and so they took to “calling a ‘spade’ [pejorative for a Black person] a ‘spade’”. Is there any truth in this? – Michael Raynor.

In a word, no. Although the English language, and particularly American English, contains many examples of the influence of racism on popular speech, in this particular case there is ample evidence to prove the defendant phrase not guilty. “To call a spade a spade” not only predates slavery in North America by quite a bit but harks all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, occurring in the work of, among others, the playwright Aristophanes, and is still commonly heard in modern Greek. The original phrase seems to have been “to call a fig a fig; to call a kneading trough a kneading trough,” applied to someone who spoke exceedingly frankly. Evidently, when the phrase was first translated from Greek in the Renaissance, the Greek word for “trough” was confused with the Greek for “spade,” and thus the modern version was born. The “spade” referred to in the phrase, incidentally, was the digging implement, and not the black character on playing cards that underlies the racial epithet.

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A cubicle is just a padded cell without a door.

[CurtC]

From the alt.usage.english FAQ:

“to call a spade a spade”

is NOT an ethnic slur.
It derives from an ancient Greek expression: ta syka syka, te:n skaphe:n de skaphe:n onomasein = “to call a fig a fig, a trough a trough”. This is first recorded in Aristophanes’ play The Clouds (423 B.C.), was used by Menander and Plutarch, and is still current in modern Greek. There has been a slight shift in meaning: in ancient times the phrase was often used pejoratively, to denote a rude person who spoke his mind tactlessly; but it now, like the English phrase, has an exclusively positive connotation. It is possible that both the fig and the trough were originally sexual symbols.

In the Renaissance, Erasmus confused Plutarch’s “trough” (skaphe:) with the Greek word for “digging tool” (skapheion; the two words are etymologically connected, a trough being something that is hollowed out) and rendered it in Latin as ligo. Thence it was translated into English in 1542 by Nicholas Udall in his translation of Erasmus’s version as “to call a spade […] a spade”. (Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations perpetuates Erasmus’ error by mistranslating skaphe: as “spade” three times under Menander.)

“To call a spade a bloody shovel” is not recorded until 1919. “Spade” in the sense of “Negro” is not recorded until 1928. (It comes from the colour of the playing card symbol, via the phrase “black as the ace of spades”.)

This, of course, does not necessarily render the modern use of “to call a spade a spade” “politically correct”. Rosalie Maggio, in The Bias-Free Word-Finder, writes: “The expression is associated with a racial slur and is to be avoided”, and recommends using “to speak plainly” or other alternatives instead. In another entry, she writes: “Although by definition and derivation ‘niggardly’ and ‘nigger’ are completely unrelated, ‘niggardly’ is too close for comfort to a word with profoundly negative associations. Use instead one of the many available alternatives: stingy, miserly, parsimonious…” Beard and Cerf, in The Official Politically Correct Handbook, p. 123, report that an administrator at the University of California at Santa Cruz campaigned for the banning of such phrases as “a chink in his armor” and “a nip in the air”, because “chink” and “nip” are also derogatory terms for “Chinese person” and “Japanese person” respectively. In the late 1970s in the U.S., a boycott of the (now defunct) Sambo’s restaurant chain was organized, even though the name “Sambo’s” was a combination of the names of its two founders and did not come from the offensive word for dark-skinned person.

[RealityChuck]

I’m surprised no one protested over the movie “Shine.”

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“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.

www.sff.net/people/rothman

[Slithy_Tove]

and Niagra Falls

[Cartooniverse]

Oh hell, a well-educated man was fired over the use of the word “niggardly” a year or two ago. PLEASE !!! I’ve got black first cousins, I’m a Jew, and my kids are Korean…but PLEASE !!! That one case took P.C. to the bitter freaking END.

<shudder> Sometimes, that line gets crossed by people who actually thought they were simply using the LANGUAGE of choice to express themselves. I find that despicable.

<------- Daintily stepping off of soap box now, returning to my rainbow coalition family

Cartooniverse

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If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.

[Cartooniverse]

Originally posted by CurtC:
From the alt.usage.english FAQ:
"to call a spade a spade"

CURT? YOU ROCK, MY FRIEND. Holy moley. Now, THERE’S someone in love with ancient languages…

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If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.