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

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The compulsion to prove that I know what I’m talking about (because I don’t) is going to be pretty irresistible. It’s up to us to give our prospects something they’ve never heard before—or never seen in quite the same way. 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.

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 . In the case of emptying it, it was often to yield a mostly intact empty eggshell that could be painted… generally for Easter. Of course no one element in Rosenshine’s is new; what is new is the fact that he had the temerity to curate the principles into one place. Even if people are new to hearing about his work, the ideas Rosenshine describes are absolutely not new.In any case, the Indians don't impute the practice to "old white people" or to "toothless white people" but to "the white people. The Phrase Finder has "Don't try to teach your Grandma to suck eggs" is older than you might think, but without any explanation of the egg sucking part. The Wikipedia page on "Teaching grandmother to suck eggs" (cited in a comment beneath the original post above in a comment by Matt E.

This dictionary also mentions the Latin phrase sus Minervam (docet), which means a sow, or a swine, teaches Minerva (Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom). Raw eggs, with or without a little seasoning, used to be a popular food and were regarded as healthy.

In 1707, Francisco de Quevedo coined the expression “Teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs”—a colourful reference to the fact that Spanish grannies who’d lost their teeth were adept at sucking eggy goodness through a pinhole in raw eggs. Teaching ( your) grandmother to suck eggs is an English language saying that refers to a person giving advice to another person in a subject with which the other person is already familiar (and probably more so than the first person).

Isn’t there a difference between teaching egg-sucking and careful signposting that lets our audience know they’re in the right place? It pays to make it explicitly clear when sharing your thoughts and enthusiasm that you might not be the first person to hear of the ideas and that some people you are talking to will know all about it and may well be quite skilled and experienced already. It was such a commonplace procedure then that to "teach your grandmother to suck eggs" was like a child trying to teach as new something the grandmother well knew how to do.

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. Just watch the tone; engage people in giving their perspectives before assuming they’re starting from zero. Being overlooked can be distressing but it is not the fault of the ideas – talk to the people running these things and ask or offer to take the lead on a future occasion. I think this is at the root of the various derisive uses of the phrase (the other example being "go suck eggs"). But give our tribe a new bit of software to evangelise…and excruciating introductory sentences (see above), awash in industry truisms, are a definite possibility.

A person who followed Wikipedia's method and poked a single pinhole into an egg would probably find the subsequent sucking operation far less satisfactory than anticipated.

As for the Wikipedia article's surmise that sucking raw eggs was a practice limited to the old and toothless, that notion seems contrary to the historical record, too. If both sides of the egg-sucking scenario do their bit, we have harmony and can get on with discussing those ideas.