英语词汇lay an egg的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

lay an egg. Comedians and other entertainers complain that they laid an egg, that their act “bombed,” utterly failed, but the phrase originated in the sports world, not in show business. Stranger still, the expression comes from the sport of cricket, England’s national game. Duck’s egg was British slang for “no score” in cricket for many years, and in about 1860 the expres- sion achieved a duck’s egg was used to describe a team that hadn’t scored and had only large oval zeroes shaped like duck’s eggs on the scoreboard. Ten years later the phrase became the more expressive laid a duck’s egg and this came into American baseball slang as laid a goose egg. In baseball the expression for “zero” soon became just goose eggs, and it still is, but early vaudevillians adopted the expression “they killed the goose that laid the rotten eggs” and changed it to laid an egg.

词汇	lay an egg
词源	lay an egg. Comedians and other entertainers complain that they laid an egg, that their act “bombed,” utterly failed, but the phrase originated in the sports world, not in show business. Stranger still, the expression comes from the sport of cricket, England’s national game. Duck’s egg was British slang for “no score” in cricket for many years, and in about 1860 the expres- sion achieved a duck’s egg was used to describe a team that hadn’t scored and had only large oval zeroes shaped like duck’s eggs on the scoreboard. Ten years later the phrase became the more expressive laid a duck’s egg and this came into American baseball slang as laid a goose egg. In baseball the expression for “zero” soon became just goose eggs, and it still is, but early vaudevillians adopted the expression “they killed the goose that laid the rotten eggs” and changed it to laid an egg.
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