Eventually, the phrase "black as the ace of spades" also became widely used, further strengthening the association between spades and playing cards. The word would change further in the years to come. It was also in the 1920s that the "spade" in question began to refer to the spade found on playing cards. "Wonder where all the spades keep themselves?" one of Thurman's characters asks.
ACE OF SPADES GAME ORIGINIAL HOW TO
"Don't know how to handle the womens." Fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman then used the word in his novel The Blacker The Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, a widely read and notable work that explored prejudice within the African-American community. "Jake is such a fool spade," wrote McKay. The Oxford English Dictionary says the first appearance of the word spade as a reference to blackness was in Claude McKay's 1928 novel Home to Harlem, which was notable for its depictions of street life in Harlem in the 1920s. O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman's book Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language.
ACE OF SPADES GAME ORIGINIAL CODE
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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