30 June 2020
A spade can be a shovel, a suit in a standard deck of cards, or a derogatory term for a black person, and we can call a spade a spade. But what do any of these spades have to do with one another? It turns out that English has two different words that are spelled spade that people often conflate. One is the shovel that we call a spade, and the other is the card suit and racial epithet. They have very different origins.
The shovel sense goes back to the Old English spadu, and it is cognate with other Germanic words like the present-day German spaten and the Dutch spade. An example of the Old English word can be found in the life of St. Mary of Egypt. Mary has just died, and Abbot Zosimus is frustrated because he cannot bury her:
Ac hwæt ic nu ungesælige, forþon ic nat mid hwi ic delfe, nu me swa wana is ægþer ge spadu ge mattuc.
But what is unfortunate me to do now, for I do not know how to dig, since I lack both spade and mattock.
This sense of the word comes down to the present day pretty much unchanged.
To call a spade a spade is to speak plainly and directly, without euphemism. The spade in the expression is also a shovel, but the history of that expression is a bit convoluted. It goes back to Plutarch (c.46–c.119 C.E.) and his Apophthegmata Laconica (Sayings of the Spartans) found in his Moralia. Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, had besieged the city of Olynthus in Chalkidiki, in what is now modern Greece, and two the city’s leading citizens, Euthycrates and Lastenes, had betrayed the city to Philip:
τῶν δὲ περὶ Λασθένην τὸν Ὀλύνθιον ἐγκαλούντων καὶ ἀγανακτούντων, ὅτι προδότας αὐτοὺς ἔνιοι τῶν περὶ τὸν Φίλιππον ἀποκαλοῦσι, σκαιοὺς ἔφη φύσει καὶ ἀγροίκους εἶναι Μακεδόνας καὶ τὴν σκάφην σκάφην λέγοντας.
(When the men associated with Lasthenes, the Olynthian, complained with indignation because some of Philip's associates called them traitors, he said that the Macedonians are by nature a rough and rustic people who call a vessel a vessel.)
The key word here, σκαφος or skathos, can mean anything that is hollowed out, a bowl, a boat, a trough, etc. Vessel is perhaps the best English equivalent.
Skip forward to northern Europe in the sixteenth century. Desiderius Erasmus, writing in Latin, translates Plutarch thusly:
Philippus respondit “Macedones esse ingenio parum dextro, sed plane rusticanos, qui ligonem nihil aliud nossent vocare quàm ligonem,” alludens ad illud prouerbium celebre, τὰ σῦκα σῦκα, τὴν σκάφην σκάφην λέγων.
(Philip responded that the Macedonians were by nature unsophisticated, and also completely rustic, who do not know any name for a mattock but mattock, alluding to the famous proverb, calling a fig a fig and a vessel a vessel.)
Erasmus here translates the Greek σκαφος (skathos) as the Latin ligo, meaning a mattock or pickaxe. Whether Erasmus confused that word with a supposed noun form of the verb σκάπτειν (skaptein), meaning to dig, or whether he was taking a bit of translator’s license is unknown. The proverb he alludes to is from Lucian of Samosata (c.125–c.180 C.E.) who gives the following advice in writing plainly in his Quomodo historia conscribenda sit (How to Write History):
τα συκα συκα, την σκαφην δε σκαφην ονομασων
(Calling a fig a fig, and a vessel a vessel.)
In 1542, Nicolas Udall translated Erasmus’s Apophthegmata into English, bringing the expression into this language:
Philippus aunswered, that the Macedonians wer feloes of no fyne witte in their termes, but alltogether grosse, clubbyshe, and rusticall, as the whiche had not the witte to calle a spade by any other name then a spade. Alludyng to that the commenused prouerbe of the grekes, callyng figgues, figgues: and a bote a bote.
To recap, spade meaning shovel goes back to Old English. When translating the Greek adage containing the word for vessel, Erasmus used the Latin word or mattock or pickaxe. And when casting Erasmus’s words into English, Udall picked up on the digging implement and translated it as spade. In a way, Udall’s use of to call a spade a spade is ironic, because that’s not what the translation is doing.
The other spade, that in the deck of cards and the racial epithet, has a very different origin. It’s from the Italian spada or sword. That stylized pip on the cards may be fat and resemble a pointed shovel, but it is supposed to represent a sword. The word appears in John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes:
Cápperi, as Cáppari, those markes vpon the playing cards called spades.
The racial epithet comes from the phrase black as the ace of spades, which dates to at least 1821 when it appears in the New-England Galaxy on 28 September in a review of a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III by black performers:
If any proofs are wanting of the native genius of vigour of thought of our coloured fellow-citizens, surely their conception of Shakspeare [sic] will be sufficient, and how delighted would the bard of Avon have been to see his Richard performed by a fellow as black as the ace of spades.
Use of spade as a standalone racial epithet dates to at least 20 July 1910 when it appears in Bud Fisher’s Mutt & Jeff comic strip:
Don’t be bumpin’ into me, white man! I’se a tough spade, I is!
The two different words are often conflated, with people interpreting to call a spade a spade as racially charged. While the origin of that phrase has nothing to do with color or race, the other sense of spade has tainted the phrase, and it should be used with care, if at all.
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