A funny thing from Clackson (2016): in Annals 1.65, Tacitus literally refuses to call a spade a spade. He’s describing how the Roman legions, during a battle against some Germanic tribes, are struggling to defend themselves; they have to build ramparts, but unfortunately for them, they’ve lost most of their spades—amissa magna ex parte per quae egeritur humus aut exciditur caespes—except he doesn’t just use the word pala ‘spade’ but instead quite unnecessarily refers to the spades periphrastically as per quae egeritur humus aut exciditur caespes, literally ‘that by which the earth is tilled or the turf is cut’. Clackson describes this as a ‘notorious’ usage so presumably it’s well-known among classicists.
Reference:
Clackson, J. (2016). Latin as a source for the Romance languages. In Ledgeway, A., & Maiden, M. (Eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (pp. 3–13). Oxford University Press.
