A curate's egg

[BringBackCoffeeCreams]

Have you heard this expression before?

The English teacher at my school asked me to explain this to his class as when he googled it it said it was a British expression. So as I'm the only brit it fell to me to explain.

Have I lived under a rock for the last 50 years as I didn't have the foggiest. I asked DH when I got home and he knew it. But he's weird so that's not a fair test of how well known it is.

Do you know what it means? I wouldn't want this class of foreigners thinking we're all going round spouting stuff like this if you're all as clueless as I was.

My husband (50 yrs old) was described as a curate’s egg In one of his school reports 😂
He understood it as ‘looks good, but what does it do?’
Should I read him this thread or not? 😅

Ah I see! So 'jam tomorrow' is a bit melancholy. Something much desired that never really arrives. Poor Alice.

Yes, I knew this.

I think of it more as meaning that the thing has bad aspects that are so bad they ruin the whole thing, even though there are some aspects of it that are okay or good. Like describing a film as a curate's egg because while you can praise the cinematography and the costume design etc., the lead actor is so cringey and terrible that the film is unwatchable.

But as to the OP's question, in my experience it's so rarely used that even those who've come across it before don't all agree on the exact meaning.

No idea. I think plenty don't know what a curate is even..

I think it was still in publication until 40 years or so ago but really its heyday was the 1880s! This is the curate's egg cartoon.

"True Humility": Bishop: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones"; Curate: "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!" George du Maurier, 1895

Ohhh! How fantastic - that's brilliant, thank you.

I am in early 50s and have heard it but would never use it. I think of it as quite a pre-ww2 phrase. Something you would here a PG woodehouse or early Agatha Christie character using.

I know it and use it, but rarely hear anyone else use it unless they’re my age or older. I’m in my late 40s.

It would be a shame for it to die out as it’s a useful expression. But I imagine a lot of people don’t know what a curate is either, so that won’t help.

Every day really is a school day.

I think it was still in publication until 40 years or so ago but really its heyday was the 1880s!

The final issue was in 1992 and included a reprint of this cartoon with the caption:

Curate: This f*king egg is bad.

Ahaha!

I think I need to read Punch!

I had to google that as well my

Ha!

Isn't it funny that out of the thousands of cartoons they must have printed over their 150 years that this is one of, or the most, famous?

No - someone’s posted the actual cartoon above, and it means that something is bad but you’re tactfully trying to pretend it isn’t — not that it really does have good parts. Because of an egg goes bad it’s bad all the way through! It can’t be only bad in parts because the egg is liquid (before it’s cooked) - it’s the whole egg that goes off 😂

I think the modern day supermarket egg means one rarely gets a genuine bad egg these days, so many people don’t fully understand the joke.

It was completely familiar to me, but I am 72. I just asked my (American) husband, and he'd never heard of it.

Feeling really, really old as I skim through this. I'm 61 and have known and used this phrase most of my life. I was brought up in the Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian and doesn't have curates, but I know what they are. It helped that I read a lot of Trollope when young.

George du Maurier was Daphne's grandfather, btw.

I think of a curate as the sort of vicar that plain or desperate women in Jane Austen books marry.

Never heard it used though seen it in old tv programmes. I'm pretty well read and have good comprehension and I didn't know the full meaning so I wouldn't have been able to explain either

I'm familiar with the cartoon, I've seen it before. The description I gave is how I've mostly seen it used in practice — to describe something that has bad aspects that are so bad they spoil the whole thing.

Isn't a curate something like a vicar's assistant/trainee, who will eventually have a parish of his own to be vicar of?

Definitely this, teaching can get 'current' use wrong by 10+ years. When I was learning English in the early 2000s the textbook included 'WPC' (woman police constable) - I'm sure that was abandoned quite some years before!

Yes, exactly. So you are promised something but you realise it's never going to happen.

It’s often used mistakenly because people didn’t always understand the joke 😂 That’s the point of it. Those who are using it genuinely to mean “good in parts” are traditionally part of the joke — sorry!

It’s a well known example of a running literary joke that many readers don’t get. One effect of the joke is that the “curate’s egg” is used to pretend that one is being complimentary when they’re in fact being anything but. It’s a play on the popular misunderstanding of the saying. If I say that someone is a “curate’s egg”, I’m relying on the double joke that some people will assume I’m tactfully saying someone is a bit of a mixture really; but others know that I really mean the person is thoroughly awful. (Sorry to the pp upthread whose husband got described as a curate’s egg in his school report. That teacher REALLY did not like him 😂🤣)