Calling a spade. . . .

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:49 PM -0400 6/30/08, George Thompson wrote:
>Thought you had heard the last on this topic, didn't you?
>
>My email connection has been recalcitrant lately, or I would have
>posted this tidbit while you all were still hankering for more.
>
>Archer Taylor, in his book The Proverb, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
>U. P., 1931), in a chapter on non-proverbial fixed expressions, says
>"The phrase to call a spade a spade may allude to a spayed dog, and
>possibly we can find support for this explanation in the synonymous
>Italian to call a cat a cat (chiamar gatta gatta).

Well, the confusion is alive and well.  When searching the
classifieds in our weekly free neighborhood paper for a kitten toward
the end of the previous century, we came across an ad that

      SR. CITIZEN KITTY needs loving home, spade, all shots, healthy.
      I've been a good kitty & promise to be a purr-fect pet.  Please
      call ____.  Love Kitty.

There are currently over 2000 raw hits for "spade cat", only some of
which involve intentional wordplay.  But it is hard to agree with
Archie Taylor's claimed allusion.

LH

>  On the other hand, the German to show him what a rake is (einem
>zeigen was eine Harke ist) suggests that "spade" means a garden
>implement."  (pp. 192-93)
>
>Taylor was a great scholar in various aspects of folklore -- my fans
>may remember my boasting of having once read his history of the
>nose-thumbing gesture (The Shanghai Gesture).  Still, I don't find
>the "spayed dog" explanation very likely.  The Italian analogy isn't
>persuasive, and I have never encountered "spayed" used as a noun, as
>it is in the expression.  Still, the possibility that it was
>originally a racial slur seems discountenanced.
>
>GAT
>
>George A. Thompson
>Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre",
>Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org