Bacon and Eggs vs. Eggs and Bacon

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Chris from San Antonio, Texas.

Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Chris. What’s on your mind?

My wife is from California, and I am from Texas.

And there are a bunch of things that we say differently.

And this has kind of become a small, you know, lighthearted argument between the two of us.

We have a bunch of them.

And one of them was just the phrase, bacon and eggs.

I’ve always said bacon and eggs.

And she says eggs and bacon and insisted that eggs and bacon was the more common usage.

What?

Wait a second.

This is what you’re arguing about?

I always thought, oh, yeah, we’re going to have to help them with the financial troubles.

Do we have kids?

I made up a song while I was cooking breakfast about bacon and eggs.

And she said, oh, I think you mean eggs and bacon.

So which came first, the bacon or the eggs, right?

That’s right, yeah.

Wow.

Okay. So we always ask this question, but I want to know, is there anything on the line here?

Is there a bet?

There’s a small, friendly wager on it.

Okay.

Who cooks breakfast?

Who cooks the bacon and eggs?

Who gets the bacon and eggs or who gets the eggs and bacon?

Let’s break this down. We have data on this. We can actually look this up. Google Ingrams will do it. Any good corpus of data will do this.

Bacon and eggs is substantially more popular than eggs and bacon.

But don’t start doing your victory dance yet.

The problem with this is that neither of these phrases is really idiomatic.

Either one is completely acceptable, and neither one is ensconced on the language in such a way that it can’t be altered.

They’re both totally fine.

And I don’t know why you would argue about eggs and bacon versus bacon and eggs, but okay.

It’s better than arguing about other things.

That’s right.

I think.

Sheet stealing, maybe.

I don’t know.

I think it’s good that it’s the only thing we argue about.

Yeah.

Oh, that’s nice.

Yeah, that’s great.

You put all your anger into the useless things.

You can look for data and try to support this argument one way or the other, but really it’s just kind of fishing in the dark with no bait.

There’s just no consistency here.

The question usually is, does it get fixed in the language as a thing?

And whether or not something gets fixed in language as a thing is almost an accident.

Not always, but for example, we talked on the show previously about socks and shoes.

Right.

But most people say shoes and socks.

Put on your shoes and socks, even though the order is wrong.

It became ensconced in language as mostly shoes and socks.

Even though either one is perfectly fine, totally grammatical, completely allowed by English.

Right.

And then there are other phrases that are set, like little old lady.

You wouldn’t say old little lady, for example.

Yeah, when we talk about order of adjectives, adjectives have a specific order in English.

It becomes intuitive to English as a first language speakers.

You have things like black and blue.

We would never say blue and black.

Probably not, right?

There’s a few other things like this.

We would say flesh and blood, not blood and flesh.

Body and soul, not soul and body.

Right.

So those are ensconced and fixed as almost immutable idiomatic expressions.

But bacon and eggs and eggs and bacon are not.

Yeah.

I’m assuming her whole family then said eggs and bacon, and that was fine.

Yeah.

Maybe in our house.

Yeah, that’s kind of how it went.

I’m a bacon and egg—

What about you, Martha?

Soy, sausage.

Sausage and nothing.

No, there’s no comma between soy and sausage.

It would just be soy sausage.

Okay.

Not even the fake bacon?

The faken?

Yeah, sure, fake bacon.

Okay.

Sure, yeah, and eggs.

And eggs, okay.

Yeah.

Well, Christopher, you’re going to have to tell us about all the other disputes sometime, all right?

Send us an email, and we’ll see if we can tease those out, too.

All right, guys.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Cheers, bye-bye.

Thanks, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I bet we’re going to hear from some eggs and bacon types.

Don’t you think?

I bet we will, too, yeah.

Yeah.

And the number that they would call is 877-929-9673.

Or you can send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.