Skip to main content

Lay an Egg


Due to the number zero looking *like* an egg this saying started popping up when scoreboards would publish zeros as scores for teams who didn't do well. People started saying the team, or player, had laid an egg. You could use the term for just about anything that gets a score of zero - a sport, a grade, etc.  There's a couple of different sources for this term, to read up on them click here and here.





Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Call it a Day

The literal use of this phrase hails from 1838 when the phrase originally was "call it half a day" to mean leaving work early. (source) The modern use of the phrase is to indicate ending something due to false sense of accomplishment. 
Post a Comment
Read more

More bang for your buck

This phrase was used a lot in 1953 but an earlier citation puts it at 1940 in a Metals and Plastics Publications advertisement. Read about it here . The phrase means you get more for your money.
Post a Comment
Read more

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment. 
Post a Comment
Read more