Sports Guy's editor missed something...

I had no idea spade could be used as a racial slur. Never heard it or read it used as anything but a shape on a playing card. Somebody should print a dictionary of what's not acceptable and pass it out to white guys like me and make it required reading in HS English, so we don't inadvertantly stick our foot in our mouth like Simmons must have done.

(And when I say 'foot in mouth', I mean the terminal part of the leg, below the ankle joint, on which the body stands and moves, in our opening through which an animal or human takes in food -- not any kind of obscure racial or otherwise bigoted reference. Sirens off, PC Police.)

 

That's funny ... I read that reference today, and it did set off my PC alarm.

$10 sez it was changed in response to a complaint.

 

While watching a sexual harrassment video at my new hire orientation on Monday, the other new kid noticed they used "the best rule of thumb is..." I smiled and nodded because I had NO idea that it was a sexual reference.

 

"Porch monkey" is a racial slur??

We're taking it back!!

 

Re: Rule of thumb.
I thought it was an old English phrase, where a man was allowed to hit his wife with a stick no bigger than his thumb. Not sure of the sexual connotations.

 

Maybe he was just relating it to sexual harrassment and not just a sexual reference. I mean, in terms of men being "above" women in the reference.

Hmmm..

 

What is the origin of 'calling a spade a spade'?

John Knox borrowed his "I have learned to call wickedness by its own terms: a fig a fig, and a spade a spade" from the traditional Latin proverb, ficus ficus, ligonem ligonem vocat, which is sometimes attributed to Plutarch but likely predates him and was a Roman folk saying without any historic (that is, written) origin.

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 Plutarch, 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 described the life of ancient Athens so faithfully that he inspired a critic to exclaim, 'Menander and Life, which of you imitated the other?' If this is so, to 'call a spade a spade'' 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." "Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997).

 

Never knew spade was a slur. If that's true, I now have a real reason to dislike Norman Chad.

 

While I don't think for a second Simmons was doing anything but using a poker analogy, that sentence did stop me the first time I read it.

 

Potentially incendiary? So we've gotten to the point where someone almost has to be racist (or sexist or whatever) to begin with in order to detect "racism" in a writer who harbors none. Back-asswards.

 

somewhere, somehow, the little guy from just shoot me weeps.

 

he should weep, he sucks