Does this have any definate meaning. I Googled around and can’t seem to find an explination that works.
I was watching Beverly Hillbillies and Granny is running against Mrs Drysdale for possum queen and Granny says “Anyone who’d vote for her would suck eggs.”
Is this just a way of substituting eggs for a more risque word you can’t say on TV?
I always just thought it meant they’d do disgusting stuff. I had a grandmother who could occasionally be persuaded to suck an egg, to the horror and delight of her pleading grandchildren. She’d poke a hole in each end, suck out and swallow the contents. We’d all squeal and clap and shout at her how repulsive that was, and she would beam with delight.
There appear to be at least a couple of different phrases incorporating the term:
“Go suck an egg” (American) - a general go-away type of insult
“Teaching your grandmother to suck eggs” (British) - meaning to presume to instruct someone actually more knowledgeable than yourself.
The contents of a raw egg can be removed by carefully breaking a small hole in each end, then blowing through the top one. I believe it’s also possible to do it with just one hole (rendering the empty shell potentially more useful for whatever purpose), but it requires the raw contents of the egg to be sucked out in small amounts.
I have no idea if this is related to either phrase, but sucking eggs in order to decorate the nearly-intact empty shells does sound like a sort of grandmotherly craft.
“Teaching Grandma¶ to suck eggs” isn’t predominantly British, IMO. I’ve heard it in the US as well. Heinlein put it in the mouth of Jubal Harshaw in “Stranger in a Strange Land”.
World Wide Words dates the “grandma” thing to 1707 in print:
We also have “egg suckin[g]” as a derogatory adjective as in “Dirty old egg suckin[g] dog.” by Johnny Cash.
Many animals have this lamentable habit, including otherwise urbane and erudite weasels …
When I was growing up in New Orleans in the 70’s, “go suck an egg” basically meant “fuck off.” It was a pretty common insult. If I said it and my mother found out, I would actually have to suck an egg as 3acresandatruck described. Nasty.
Isn’t there a scene in The Hobbit where Bilbo and Gollum are trading riddles and Gollum guesses right on “egg” because he remembers that he used to sit with his grandmother by the river (?) and suck eggs? Maybe this expression was in the back of Tolkien’s mind.
[slight hijack]Incidentally, “suck an egg” was a very handy insult when I was in elementary school because it directly translates into Finnish as “ime munaa”, which means “suck [my] dick”, so it was a way to insult classmates without the (English, American, Canadian etc.) teachers catching on to the severity of the phrase.[/slight hijack]
I think that Granny in your example is using it in the context of the egg-sucking dog; in other words, someone who is low-down, a scoundrel.
I believe that the phrase comes from noticing animals who will sneak up to a nest and suck the contents out of an egg.
So you’re relating the person you’re talking to to a thief and baby-killer.
Another reason why Granny might be assumed to be proficient in egg-sucking is that she may be (especially in times past) a little deficient in the tooth department. A raw egg is a handy source of liquid protein.
It references the egg stealing vermin that would eat the egg contents. The farmer goes to the chicken coop to find the eggs are broken.