It's Great for Scurvy Too!
Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans featured this line, “They were all in goodly gilt armours, and braue purple cassocks apon them, spicke, and spanne new”. Eventually, the new got dropped in a cost-saving measure. The first person to use the expression in writing (as far as anybody knows) was Samuel Pepys, who wrote in a 1665 diary entry that his acquaintance Lady Batten was “walking through the dirty lane with new spick-and-span white shoes”. But where, pray, does this oddball term come from, you axe. Well read on, my friend.