O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman's book Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language. In the late 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance, "spade" began to evolve into code for a black person, according to Patricia T. And in so doing he dramatically changed the phrase to "call a spade a spade." (This may have been an incorrect translation but seems more likely to have been a creative interpretation and a deliberate choice.) "Spade" stuck because of Erasmus' considerable influence in European intellectual circles, writes the University of Vermont's Wolfgang Mieder in his 2002 case study Call a Spade a Spade: From Classical Phrase to Racial Slur. in Greek literature, recently pointed out that the original Greek expression was very likely vulgar in nature and that the "figs" and "troughs" in question were double entendres.Įrasmus, the renowned humanist and classical scholar, translated the phrase "to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough" from Greek to Latin. The Greek historian Plutarch (who died in A.D. Some attribute it to Aristophanes, while others attribute it to the playwright Menander. Historians trace the origins of the expression to the Greek phrase "to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough." Exactly who was the first author of "to call a trough a trough" is lost to history. What happens when a perfectly innocuous phrase takes on a more sinister meaning over time?Ĭase in point, the expression "to call a spade a spade." For almost half a millennium, the phrase has served as a demand to "tell it like it is." It is only in the past century that the phrase began to acquire a negative, racial overtone. So where did the phrase "call a spade a spade" come from?
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