![]() ![]() We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land." "We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. One of the more famous mentions of the phrase came in Oscar Wilde's 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest: In fact, one form of the expression that emerged later was "to call a spade a bloody shovel." The early usages of the word "spade" did not refer to either race or skin color. To be clear, the "spade" in the Erasmus translation has nothing to do with a deck of cards, but rather the gardening tool. Famous authors who have used it in their works include Charles Dickens and W. "To call a spade a spade" entered the English language when Nicholas Udall translated Erasmus in 1542. 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. ![]() Erasmus, the renowned humanist and classical scholar, translated the phrase "to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough" from Greek to Latin. ![]()
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