I was browsing Area 51 and I saw this comment:
I'm just calling a spade, a spade.
I'm never quite sure how to punctuate sentences like these where a phrase is repeated back to back, without any other words to separate them. Not putting punctuation feels weird, but so does adding a comma. Neither intuitively read like I would say them in a conversation.
With a comma, I would pause before reading the second "a spade"; without punctuation, the inflexion in my voice would be off.
So, is "I'm just calling a spade, a spade." properly punctuated?
Best Answer
You don't need the interposing comma. Just say
The Subaru commercials get this awkwardly wrong:
No comma needed there either.
Compare the idea using two other nouns.
You would never use a comma there. And just because the nouns are the same doesn't change the sentence structurally.