Sucking Eggs: What Your Wartime Granny Could Teach You about Diet, Thrift and Going Green

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We’re non-experts (to put it mildly) marketing to experts, and that can make us very nervous indeed. To grope a fowl means to use the fingers to measure the distance between its pelvic bones: if these are close together, it is not laying and can be consigned to the pot. I can sympathise with that feeling but I’d still encourage people to be charitable to those who are simply sharing ideas. the skill was to make a hole in either end of the egg, insert a needle to whip around and break the yolk, at which point it could be sucked (or blown) to enjoy, or just to empty it. And speaking of concrete, there are some superb examples of cutting straight to the point—in the construction industry.

But their awareness of "the manner of the white people" in sucking raw eggs suggests that this practice was fairly widespread among white people (in North America, anyway) at the time. Non-personalized content and ads are influenced by things like the content you’re currently viewing and your location (ad serving is based on general location).Even if people are new to hearing about his work, the ideas Rosenshine describes are absolutely not new. The phrase to teach one’s grandmother to suck eggs means to presume to advise a more experienced person.

Raw eggs, with or without a little seasoning, used to be a popular food and were regarded as healthy. 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. It's not always intuitive that an air in-flow hole is helpful in extracting contents from a sealed container (e. The Book of Anecdotes, and Budget of Fun: Containing a Collection of Over One Thousand of the Most Laughable Sayings and Jokes of Celebrated Wits and Humorists . When you're telling somebody something they already know well, it's sometimes said that you're "teaching grandma to suck eggs".Sucking an egg from a shell that has a single hole in it is not possible if done with the lips/mouth (and weasels don't have lips.

At some point, however, the logical metaphor lost favor, and the phrase mutated: instead of teaching your grandma something she knows better than you because she's been doing it since she was three years old, the phrase became about things that anyone with a modicum of intelligence can figure out how to do, if only they could come up with a reason to do them in the first place. As B2B marketers we’re in the business of selling to world-leading egg-suckers—having never once put an egg in our own mouths.In Latin they say Sus Minervam, when an unlearned dunce goeth about to teach his better or a more learned man, then doth the Hog teach Pallas ², or as we say in English, the foul Sow teach the fair Lady to spin. Apparently some people, especially older village women, had the secret to tell by touch whether a goose or duck was likely to lay eggs, and teach your grandame to grope her ducks is even older, from 1611 (more on 16th century poultry groping here). A line that goes something like: This marketing is for X [name your experts] who already know ABC [industry fundamentals].