英语词汇call a spade a spade的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

call a spade a spade. To be straightforward and call things by their right names, to avoid euphemisms or beating around the bush. The words are from the garden, not from the game of poker. So old is this expression that it wasn’t original with Plu- tarch, who used it back in the first century when writing about Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father. The saying has been credited to the Greek comic poet Menander, who de- scribed the life of ancient Athens so faithfully that he inspired a critic to exclaim, “O Menander and Life, which of you imitated the other?” If this is so, to “call a spade a spade” goes back to at least 300 b.c., and the faithful Menander could have been quoting a much older Greek proverb. The expression was introduced into English by Protestant reformer John Knox, who translated it from the Latin of Erasmus as: “I have learned to call wickedness by its own terms: A fig, a fig, and a spade a spade.” Erasmus had taken the phrase from Lucian, a Greek writer of the second century and translated it as “to call a fig a fig and a boat a boat,” which is possible because the Greek words for boat and garden spade were very similar.

词汇	call a spade a spade
词源	call a spade a spade. To be straightforward and call things by their right names, to avoid euphemisms or beating around the bush. The words are from the garden, not from the game of poker. So old is this expression that it wasn’t original with Plu- tarch, who used it back in the first century when writing about Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father. The saying has been credited to the Greek comic poet Menander, who de- scribed the life of ancient Athens so faithfully that he inspired a critic to exclaim, “O Menander and Life, which of you imitated the other?” If this is so, to “call a spade a spade” goes back to at least 300 b.c., and the faithful Menander could have been quoting a much older Greek proverb. The expression was introduced into English by Protestant reformer John Knox, who translated it from the Latin of Erasmus as: “I have learned to call wickedness by its own terms: A fig, a fig, and a spade a spade.” Erasmus had taken the phrase from Lucian, a Greek writer of the second century and translated it as “to call a fig a fig and a boat a boat,” which is possible because the Greek words for boat and garden spade were very similar.
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