Meaning
To speak plainly and directly, describing something exactly as it is even when the truth is blunt or unwelcome. It names frankness about awkward facts rather than rudeness for its own sake, and it usually introduces an honest but uncomfortable judgement. Neutral to blunt; some modern speakers avoid it owing to the unrelated 20th-century slang sense of 'spade'. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The chain runs from Plutarch through a mistranslation. In Plutarch's Apophthegmata, Philip II of Macedon says his rustic countrymen 'call a tub a tub' - the Greek word skaphe means a trough, tub, or boat. Erasmus, in his Latin Apophthegmatum opus of 1533, rendered skaphe as ligo, a mattock or digging tool, apparently confusing it with a related digging word. Nicholas Udall's 1542 English translation of Erasmus then produced 'to calle a spade by any other name then a spade', where the spade is unambiguously the digging implement. John Trapp supplied the modern wording in 1647: 'Gods people shall not spare to call a spade a spade, a niggard a niggard' - 'niggard' then simply meant a miser. The idiom has no historical connection to the 20th-century American slang use of 'spade' as a racial slur, which arose centuries later, though awareness of that overlap now makes some speakers cautious. French preserves the older image with 'appeler un chat un chat' (call a cat a cat).
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- call a spade a shovel
- call a spade by any other name (historical form)
- calling a spade a spade
- let's call a spade a spade
Usage Examples
- Let's call a spade a spade: the launch failed because nobody tested the design.
- She is valued in board meetings for calling a spade a spade.
- If we call a spade a spade, this fee is simply a tax by another name.