![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Four years after Malcolm X was killed in 1965, poet Ted Joans eulogized him in his poem " My Ace of Spades." The artist David Hammons also explored the negative connotations to the word in his 1973 sculpture " Spade With Chains." Hammons once told an interviewer that he began to incorporate spades into his work because "I was called a spade once, and I didn't know what it meant. MacInnes also coined the cringeworthy word "spadelet" to refer to black infants.Īs with many other racialized terms, there were efforts to reclaim the word after it had become a slur. MacInnes has been criticized for his exotification and sexualization of black culture in his books. The British author Colin MacInnes, who was white, frequently used the term in novels like City of Spades (1957) and Absolute Beginners (1959) about the multiracial, multicultural London of the 1950s and '60s. "All these terms will give deep offense if used by nonblacks," warned Chapman, listing "spade" in a group that included words like blackbird, shade, shadow, skillet and smoke. Chapman struck a similar note in his Thesaurus of American Slang (1989). Mencken's famous book about language in the United States, "spade" is listed as one of the "opprobrious" names for "Negroes" (along with "Zulu," "skunk" and many other words that I can't print here). Wolfgang Mieder notes that in the fourth edition of The American Language, H.L. Eventually, the phrase "black as the ace of spades" also became widely used, further strengthening the association between spades and playing cards. The word would change further in the years to come. It was also in the 1920s that the "spade" in question began to refer to the spade found on playing cards. "Wonder where all the spades keep themselves?" one of Thurman's characters asks. "Don't know how to handle the womens." Fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman then used the word in his novel The Blacker The Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, a widely read and notable work that explored prejudice within the African-American community. "Jake is such a fool spade," wrote McKay. The Oxford English Dictionary says the first appearance of the word spade as a reference to blackness was in Claude McKay's 1928 novel Home to Harlem, which was notable for its depictions of street life in Harlem in the 1920s. O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman's book Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language. In the late 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance, "spade" began to evolve into code for a black person, according to Patricia T. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land." "We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. One of the more famous mentions of the phrase came in Oscar Wilde's 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest: In fact, one form of the expression that emerged later was "to call a spade a bloody shovel." The early usages of the word "spade" did not refer to either race or skin color. To be clear, the "spade" in the Erasmus translation has nothing to do with a deck of cards, but rather the gardening tool. Famous authors who have used it in their works include Charles Dickens and W. "To call a spade a spade" entered the English language when Nicholas Udall translated Erasmus in 1542. And in so doing he dramatically changed the phrase to "call a spade a spade." (This may have been an incorrect translation but seems more likely to have been a creative interpretation and a deliberate choice.) "Spade" stuck because of Erasmus' considerable influence in European intellectual circles, writes the University of Vermont's Wolfgang Mieder in his 2002 case study Call a Spade a Spade: From Classical Phrase to Racial Slur. Erasmus, the renowned humanist and classical scholar, translated the phrase "to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough" from Greek to Latin.
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