One of my favorite new obsessions is NPR’s Code Switch. I found out about it while listening to NPR one day. The show touches on topics of race and culture. Today’s thought provoking piece really caught my attention.
What happens when a perfectly innocuous phrase takes on a more sinister meaning over time?
Case 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 last century that the phrase began to acquire a negative, racial overtone.
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. Some attribute it to Aristophanes, while others attribute it to the playwright Menander. The Greek historian Plutarch (who died in 120 AD) used it in Moralia. The blogger Matt Colvin, who has a PhD 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.
Read more about calling a spade a spade NPR
Source: NPR
Notes From The Underground 