Brewer's: Spade

Why not call a spade a spade? Do not palliate sins by euphemisms.

“We call a nettle but a nettle, and the faults of fools but folly.” —Shakespeare: Coriolanus ii. 1.

“I have learned to call wickedness by its own terms: a fig a fig, and a spade a spade.” —John Knox.

Spades in cards. A corruption of the Spanish spados, pikes or swords, called by the French piques (pikes).

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