@pagrus I remember seeing something about the etymology of "good egg/bad egg" being problematic somehow, but now I have no idea where it was or how to find it again 🙃

@pagrus @twistylittlepassages have attempted some internet research and it looks like bad egg was the original invention, coming directly & uneuphamistically from how terrible rotten eggs are. There was apparently already an older term in British slang “curates egg” for when something is terrible, but politeness requires you to praise its good features anyway (wikipedia has extensive documentation on the history of this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curate%27s_egg ) and if the term has any precedent besides the actual rotten eggs it was likely that

However apparently in 2002 a British police officer claimed that political correctness had gone “too far” citing phrases he claimed the police force had been banned from using including nitty gritty & bad egg. The British police claimed they didn’t have a list of banned words at the time, and there’s no evidence that either of them would be on said list if there was, so it seems like a fair assumption that the dude just threw “bad egg” in there to try to prove how ridiculous his non-existent PC culture problem was and then it accidentally got circulated into internet lore without the context

@Satsuma@glitch.cat.family @twistylittlepassages@weirder.earth wtf, nitty gritty?