Word of the day: egging
Something that happens on Halloween is “egging” — pelting a car or house with eggs in order to create a mess and play a prank. It can also happen in a theater, or at least it used to; when a performer was particularly bad, the audience might throw eggs. Rotten ones, if possible. The same thing has occasionally happened to politicians delivering a speech to the wrong audience.
So if getting eggs thrown at you is, pretty clearly, an unpleasant experience, how come “egging” is also used in “egging you on,” which means urging you to do something. Is it the threat of having eggs thrown at you unless you submit to the urging that’s the motivator here?
The “egging on” phrase is nothing new — it’s been around since about the 1200s. The oldest known citation is from a manuscript found at Trinity College: “Alse þe deuel him to eggede.” The one from from The Romance of William of Palerne in 1375 is more understandable: “He sent enuiously to þemperour & egged him swiþe bi a certayne day bataile to a-bide.”
The addition of “on” to “egged” began to appear in the 1500s: “Ile egge them on to speake some thyng, Whiche spoken may repent them” (1566), and has stayed current ever since. But this kind of “egging”, not to mention “egging on,” is not the same kind of “egging” as “egging a house.” It’s a completely different word, and has nothing to do with eggs at all.
The “egg” in “egging on” is from the word “edge” in the sense of the sharp part of a knife. It comes from the Old Norse word “eggja,” and would seem to suggest that back in the day, being “egged on” might involve being pricked in the back by a dagger or sword. Not really the same sort of thing at all.
The other “egg” comes from the Old English “aeg,” and before that from the various Germanic languages spoken around northern Europe. It seems to be related to similar ancient words in West Aryan, Greek, Latin, and Irish, where it was “og”, but nobody is quite sure how those connections fit together. This version of “egg,” though, is even older than the version in “egging on”.
The figurative uses of “egg” such as “he’s a bad egg”, or applied to just about anything oval and white, started to appear later, evidently around the 1500s. Shakespeare used “egg” as something to call a young person: “What you Egge? Yong fry of Treachery.” And in the US in the 1800s, a common term for rating coal was “egg coal”, which referred to the size of the pieces: “The market sizes being designated egg, stove, chestnut, pea, and buckwheat” (from the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1885).
“Egg” has been employed figuratively in any number of phrases: “bad egg,” “good egg,” “egg on one’s face,” “walking on eggs,” and “putting all your eggs in one basket” as well as a couple of more obscure or obsolete ones. “To break the egg in anybody’s pocket” means to wreck their plans, and “to take eggs for money” refers to something worthless. “To have eggs on the spit” means to have business transactions in process. “As sure as eggs” means safe.
“Egg” is also used in a bewildering number of hyphenated words, from “egg-monger” to “egg-poacher” to “egg-stall” (an actual vendor’s stall in an open-air market, it might be near the fish-stall” or the vegetable-stall), egg-spoon, and “egg-pie”, which would seem to be about the same thing that today we call “quiche.” And an “egg-fraise” is nowadays called a “pancake”. There are two or three dozen more “egg” words with hyphens, but no amount of egging me on — not even the offer of a glass of “egg-hot” — is going to make me continue on any longer. And by the way, offering “egg-hot” would probably not work very well for egging most people on; it was a hot drink made from beer, eggs, sugar, and nutmeg, a combination that a few centuries back might have been served on Egg-Saturday (the Saturday before “Shrove Tuesday”).
