AboutCarol Pozefsky Expertise Etymology: The origins of English words and phrases.
Anchor/Reporter NBC and CBS Networks. News Director 3 Regional Radio Stations.
Question What is the origin of the phrase "good egg", referring to the character of a person?
Thank you!
Answer Hello and thank you for your question,
A lot has been written about the origins of the phrase 'a good egg' and I'll touch on a few theories that seem plausible.
There is speculation in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language that the word egg came to refer to a person because the human head resembles the ovoid shape of an egg. Another source says that egg refers only to a young person, an egg being a very early stage of life. There seems to be agreement that in American English a good egg was originally an agricultural term dating back to Civil War times and was the converse of a bad egg which could not be marketed. The segue to 'good egg'to refer to a good person was a logical evolution..
Believe it or not, the seemingly innocent expression 'a good egg'has been the center of some controversy in Great Britain. A report in the Manchester Guardian claimed that police were instructed not to use the phrase because it was too closely linked with 'egg and spoon' rhyming slang for 'coon', an offensive racial slur. The World Wide Words website says the phrase is an excellent example of dated slang...still to be found but only as a self-conscious archaism that reeks of a kind of old-fashioned, class-ridden Britishness that is long extinct. It first appeared in Great Britain about 1900 as slang of the public school and university for somebody pleasant, agreeable or trustworthy and also as an exclamation of enthusiastic approbation (as the big Oxford English Dictionary puts it) The humorist P.G. Wodehouse popularized the term presumably having picked it up during his school days at Dulwich in the last years of the nineteenth century. He used it first in SOMETHING FRESH in 1915. Here's a quote: "She is't going to sue me for breach? She never had any intention of doing so. The Hon. Frederick sank back on the pillows. "Good egg!" he said with fervour.
AT first 'good egg' was a humorous inversion of bad egg, which is also public-school slang, but from a half century previously. A bad egg was as thoroughly nasty a person as the literal bad egg was unpleasant to encounter.
I hope some or all of this is helpful.
The best to you always, Carol P.
