egg [ME] In the Middle Ages the Old Norse word egg started to take over from Old English ey or eye (plural eyren). The two terms were used side by side for some time, and in 1490 the printer William Caxton wrote about how difficult it was to decide which word to use. If you have egg on your face you look foolish or ridiculous. The first recorded example is from 1950s America. It probably comes from the idea of a messy eater having traces of food around their mouth, but it could also refer to a bad actor being pelted with eggs. Calling someone a good egg or a bad egg—something famous for its unpleasant smell—is now associated with the 1920s and writers such as P. G. Wodehouse, but the expressions are older than that. A disliked or unpleasant person was first called a bad egg in the 1850s; the first person to reverse the words and come up with good egg seems to have been Rudyard Kipling, in 1903. See also curate. The advertising slogan Go to work on an egg, used in Britain by the Egg Marketing Board during the 1960s, is often credited to the novelist Fay Weldon, who used to work as an advertising copywriter. She now says that it was written by another member of her team. The proverb don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs has been in use since the early 18th century to caution someone against giving unwanted advice, in particular trying to tell a more experienced or knowledgeable person how to do something that they already know. Why your grandmother should be sucking eggs in the first place is not certain, but presumably the suggestion is that she has no teeth. An intellectual or highbrow person is sometimes called an egghead because of the association of an egg-like bald head with age and wisdom. This particular use dates from the early years of the 20th century. Eggplant [M18th], an alternative for aubergine, was first used to describe a variety with white egg-shaped fruit. Egg as in to egg someone on is a different word. It comes from Old Norse eggja ‘to incite’. See also cockney, curate.