In the French Revolutionary calendar, today is Bêche (Day of the Spade). Given the nature of the French Revolutionary calendar, celebrating plants, animals and tools, we must be talking here about the garden implements rather than the Playing card suit. So here are 10 facts about spades.
The word comes from the Old English "spadu", which, like similar words in other languages, meant a digging implement.
Before the advent of metalworking, people used spades made from riven wood or the shoulder blades of animals.
Parts of a spade are the metal blade, which is sometimes referred to as the spit, the shaft shaft, which is usually made of wood, and a handle.
Is it a spade or a shovel? The words are often used interchangeably but a spade and a shovel are actually two different things, with different uses. Spades are usually straight and push force directly down, making them good for digging, while a shovel often has a curved or scooped blade, because its function is to move stuff around, like Snow or sand or loose dirt.
Hence, when you’re at the seaside and buy a bucket and spade, you are actually buying a bucket and shovel. In North America, these are called shovels with pails.
Spade blades were used as currency in ancient China.
Some Ice cream scoops are also called spades, because of their shape.
The English expression, to call a spade a spade means saying something “as it is”, speaking directly and often to the point of rudeness. The expression ultimately comes from a line in a work in ancient Greece by Plutarch. Who actually said "calling a Fig a fig, and a trough a trough". It’s thought this expression in itself was made up of double entendres and therefore quite rude. Later, Erasmus translated Plutarch’s text and it was he who altered it to be about spades. It’s thought it was a deliberate choice for dramatic effect rather than a mistake in translation. Nicholas Udall translated Erasmus in 1542 and the phrase entered the English language, and was used by many famous writers including Charles Dickens, W Somerset Maugham, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Browning, Jonathan Swift, and Oscar Wilde.
The phrase has also been seen as borderline racist, as in the late 1920s “spade” became an insulting term for a black person.
Spades today usually have footrests on both sides of the blade so both left and right footed people can use the same tool. This wasn’t always the case, however. Traditionally, a spade only had a footrest on one side. This was notably the case in rural Ireland. In due course, the English introduced spades with two footrests to the north of Ireland while farmers in the south retained the old type. This is the origin of a slur which you may have heard on Downton Abbey: the Protestants in the North would say that a person “dug with the wrong foot” or was “left-footer” meaning a Catholic person who still used the old style of spade.
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