The 'spade' lyric

From The Knight on my Couch. I have absolutely no issues with that lyric -- 'calling a spade a spade' is a phrase in parlance in NZ. It's people trained to hear like Americans who cringe at that. 😀 - Seriously: I've looked through chunks of the NZ Quotations dictionary -- because, as a lyricist, that's a book in my library👍 -- and I am yet to see a single example of spade as a racial epithet. While, yes, in America it was one. I couldn't say whether Commonwealth English as a whole would agree with me, but I'm fairly confident that for NZ English it was an appropriate phrase. - If all the musicals pros really do follow me, I think part of what surprises them is probably how different NZ English is to American or UK English. I'm cresting the wave of global interest in NZ rising since Covid: all the Māori words recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary being a reflection of the 'Aotearoa is cool' fad. Australian English is plenty different, too, but their accent is more familiar to Americans and Poms.