BBB Etymology - Call a Spade a Spade

The ancient Greeks had a popular proverb for plain speaking, 'to call figs figs, and a tub a tub'. Plutarch quoted the expression in an episode of Sayings of Kings and Commanders but, when the scholar Erasmus drew upon the work in 1500 for his Adagia (a collection of Greek and Latin proverbs traced back to their origins), he substituted 'spade' for 'tub'.