Sports Guy's editor missed something...

...the first time around.

It now says:

Before, it said:

I wonder how many people are even aware that's a slur nowadays.

 

I had no idea. Someone mentioned the other day about not using the term "calling a spade a spade." I had never heard that in terms of a slur. I just thought it meant calling it as you see it.

 

That is simply taking political correctness too far. He was making an analogy to poker. That's what those cards are called. Are we supposed to start calling it the ace of shovels?

 

I read the spade part of it this afternoon and thought absolutely nothing of it. Simmons spent two paragraphs setting up the poker analogy. It was pretty clear he wasn't using it as a slur, and to change it seems ridiculously unnecessary and overly PC to me.

 

'Calling a spade a spade' is a neutral expression of describing something honestly. Calling someone a 'spade,' on the other hand, is a racial slur of the worst kind, and of very long standing. Certainly it's fallen out of favor in the last twenty years, but that doesn't mean it isn't still offensive. Poker analogy notwithstanding, the construction of the sentence was potentially incendiary, and the editor was right to change it.

 

That is all it means, and the saying has no racial origins whatsoever. But, much like "niggardly", its something you'd best avoid saying these days just because it happens to "sounds like" another word or phrase that is a slur. That's life in PC America.

 

I'd never ever heard "spade" used as a slur. I have to go look it up to see what it means.

 

After doing the research and reading the line again, I don't get it - how could anyone have thought Simmons was referring to anything other than poker?

"...fifth (inferior black man) on the river"?

 

It's just discretion being the better part of valor.

If it was a Knicks column, they'd have to change the reference about the fifth heart on the river, since it's obvious they don't even have the one.

 

Reminds me of the time I heard a politician casually use the word "brinkspersonship" in place of "brinksmanship" in a speech.

 

That's a good joke. I don't agree, though, that this is "discretion" - seems to me like it's pre-emptive bowing to the presumed wishes of overly sensitive identity-group language policemen...who, for all we know, didn't have any problem with this particular sentence.

My other point: though I don't think the concerns are valid, Simmons' editor(s) should've felt totally justified in asking him to change the word before the column was published - after all, there's no substantive difference between the questionable word and any of its substitutes. But to change it after it was published is to unfairly malign Simmons...to make it seem as if editors thought he had said something offensive. Since it seems quite clear that he didn't, doesn't seem like a classy thing for an editor to do.

 

My favourite is when people say things like, "Jamaica's Michael Thompson is the first African-American ever to win an Olympic medal in the bobsled."