In Which I Teach You to Suck Egg
I don't mean to teach your grandmother to suck eggs but... I think I had a revelation about a funny phrase hiding in plain sight.
"I'm not going to teach your grandmother to suck eggs" or more generically "I'm not here to teach you to suck eggs" is a phrase I think I'd heard before in the states but its much more common here in Australia, being used all the time any time you're referencing a desire not teach people what they obviously already know.
This morning I thought to myself what does that even mean, so I looked it up. The explanation on wikipedia mirrors exactly what's found on various websites:The origins of the phrase are not clear. The Oxford English Dictionary and others suggest that it comes from a translation in 1707, by J. Stevens, of Francisco de Quevedo (Spanish author):[2] "You would have me teach my Grandame to suck Eggs".[3][4] A record from 1859 implies common usage by that time.[5] Most likely the meaning of the idiom derives from the fact that before the advent of modern dentistry (and modern dental prostheses) many elderly people (grandparents) had very bad teeth, or no teeth, so that the simplest way for them to eat protein was to poke a pinhole in the shell of a raw egg and suck out the contents; therefore, a grandmother was usually already a practiced expert on sucking eggs and did not need anyone to show her how to do it.
Okay, that's kind of weird but not super exciting. But here's the thing. You think about that for half a second it makes no sense. Raw eggs are disgusting is it really likely old people used to relish them? -- and if they did, it's obviously quite simple to crack one into a bowl or a cup rather than carefully punch a hole (with your one tin peasant knife?) and suck it out. Really I think that explanation is someone's wild speculation and they speculated wrong.
I think there's two keys to a more interesting explanation. It very clearly originated from Spanish. Why would this phrase have to come from Spanish? Especially if English grandmothers are the ones sucking eggs? And I think its noteworthy that it's not grandfathers, only grandmothers, and here's why...
Just the other day I was sitting with Cristina watching a Venezuelan podcast in Spanish with English subtitles. And something like "that monkey shaved that mama egg" came across and I was like "um Cristina, WTF." Turns out it was bunch of slang words that happened to come together in the sentence and the key here is that in Venezuelan "huevo" / egg is slang for "penis." I don't know how widespread this is, my Ecuadorian friend says she only knows it meaning "balls."
But anyway, that brings us to me theory. I think it's IMMINENTLY more plausble that 18th century Spanish writers were making a "yo mama" joke saying "I don't need to teach your grandmother how to suck dick" and the English just took the literal translation and ran with it. I think that makes heaps more sense than it ever being a common of grandmothers to crave raw egg so much they'd take eggs and jab a hole in them (with a knife?) rather than break them into cup.
And so to this day people are still announcing to whole rooms of people that they won't teach them to suck egg ehehehe.
In a similar vein, it also makes me giggle when stuffy conservative old Australian men say they're tired by saying "well I'm buggered" (which of course means sodomized).