You’re a Good Egg, but Are You Hard-Boiled?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant and Martha. This is Dan Ryan calling from South Bend, Indiana.

Hi, Dan.

A college friend of mine was visiting me recently, and as we were reminiscing about different friends, I found myself saying, so-and-so was a really good egg. You know, I know the meaning of the word has to do with a person who’s dependable and good-natured and kind, but I’m wondering how that came to be.

After that, I have another question for you related to the good egg.

Okay, yeah, sure.

Good egg actually is a little newer than bad egg. It started out talking about people who were untrustworthy, so around the 1850s or so. There’s this thing that you can do with eggs. You can candle them, which is you hold them up to a light source and look through them to see if the egg is good. And if an egg isn’t good, then you’ve got a bad egg. And a bad egg, as we know, is sulfurous and stinks, and there’s nothing quite as nasty as a rotten egg or a bad egg. So it’s kind of straightforward.

From a time when this country was more agriculture-focused, you know, when people were a little closer to the farms and the land than they are now. And so good egg comes along later, probably first in the United Kingdom, perhaps at Oxford University in the early 1900s. And people would, in the college slang, they would talk about good eggs, meaning good guys, good fellows. And then it shows up again and again in fiction. And so the two expressions now exist side by side. So you can have a good egg or a bad egg.

Oh, interesting.

Because when I think of the term, the opposite of a good egg, I think of a bad apple.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And a bad apple to me is a troublemaker, somebody who, there’s that expression about a bad apple spoiling the bunch.

That’s right. Yeah, that’s the original use of bad apple, this expression that not only is the person bad, but their bad behavior infects others and causes others to misbehave as well. Unfortunately, in the modern era, people have taken to using bad apple alone, not the full expression, to just mean someone who is solitary in their badness and their misbehavior. And as a way of excusing them and saying, well, it’s fine. It’s just one bad apple. But that wasn’t the original source of it.

Most European languages have some version of this expression. One rotten apple spoils the barrel. And it goes back to at least the 1300s in English. And even appears in Latin, but it’s not always the same. Other languages have slightly different versions. Like in Spanish and the Iberian languages, they’ll say a bad goat leads the whole flock astray.

That’s a good one.

That is very interesting.

Yeah, well, Dan, thank you for those questions. We really appreciate them.

You’re welcome.

While I have you, I just want to tell you that I really enjoy Martha’s puns, and I enjoy Grant’s groaning reaction.

I’m outvoted.

Keep up the problem, Martha.

Thank you, Dan. You are definitely a good egg.

Well, sorry, both of you. I appreciate the show so much. Take good care.

I’m stuck with this bad apple of a co-host. What am I going to do?

Take care of yourself, Dan.

But it’s infectious. It’s contagious. Take care.

It could be worse.

You’re right, Dan. Thanks for calling.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

If you, like Dan, are wondering about a word or phrase, this is the place to talk about it. 877-929-9673.