RichThesaurus
call a spade a spade
vs
not beat around the bush
call a spade a spade
verb
To put it bluntly, to be outspoken; to speak the truth, to say things as they really are.
not beat around the bush
How often have the words
call a spade a spade
and
not beat around the bush
occurred in a corpus of books?
(source:
Google Ngram Viewer
)