Callinga Spadea Spade

Taken from the word detective: http://www.word-detective.com/

Question: [...] perhaps you might like to address the following: "Call a spade a spade." A friend of mine from Britain used a variant of this expression, changing an aspect of it in the interests of humor, noting that in not mincing his words, he "calls a spade a bloody shovel." His sense was that the phrase had its origins in confusion over what to call a digging implement. I don't think the phrase is quite that innocent. My understanding is that in fact "calling a spade a spade" harkens back to Civil War America, when a person's freedom turned on whether or not the establishment considered one Black or not. Inter-racial liaisons were not uncommon, and so mulatto children were reasonably common. The White establishment was loath to allow itself to be "diluted" with "impure blood," and so they took to "calling a 'spade' [pejorative for a Black person] a 'spade'". Is there any truth in this? -- Michael Raynor.

Answer: In a word, no. Although the English language, and particularly American English, contains many examples of the influence of racism on popular speech, in this particular case there is ample evidence to prove the defendant phrase not guilty. "To call a spade a spade" not only predates slavery in North America by quite a bit but harks all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, occurring in the work of, among others, the playwright Aristophanes, and is still commonly heard in modern Greek. The original phrase seems to have been "to call a fig a fig; to call a kneading trough a kneading trough," applied to someone who spoke exceedingly frankly. Evidently, when the phrase was first translated from Greek in the Renaissance, the Greek word for "trough" was confused with the Greek for "spade," and thus the modern version was born. The "spade" referred to in the phrase, incidentally, was the digging implement, and not the black character on playing cards that underlies the racial epithet.

[digging his own grave. stops to address his shovel.] "You're a spade." [pauses, then looks at the camera] "I always call him that." [resumes digging] -- Neal, The Young Ones

The relevance of this page to software is as follows:

Some languages, such as the EiffelLanguage, allow features of a class to be renamed upon inheritance. Such renaming is not often needed, but it can be useful when MultipleInheritance brings in features with the same name from more than one class.

The guideline is: Always call a spade a spade, except in classes that both dig holes and play bridge.

Such a class is screaming to be refactored.

A politician is someone who calls a spade a portable, hand-operated digging implement.

--AuthorUnknown

I thought that was a marketing representative.

Crude but non-racial joke warning:

I can never hear this phrase without thinking of the following joke, due to bad influences when I was but a lad:

The Mother Superior went to the construction site next to her Order's convent and sought out the Foreman. Once found she began to dress him down for the loud, foul language being used on the site, and express her umbrage that she and the Sisters were being exposed to these crudities.

The Foreman stood his ground (he must have been an Anglican). He told the Sister that while he sympathized, he was not running a finishing school and that all he required of the men working for him was a good day's work for a good day's pay.

He told her he was not going to speak to the men, and advised her to remember that construction workers were hard-working labourers who "call a spade a spade".

The Mother Superior drew herself to her full height and said "No, they don't! They call it a fucking shovel!"