Mind your language

30 June 2007

The poet Hugo Williams, in an entertaining ramble around changes in language in the TLS the other day, noted that curate’s egg is now widely used to mean ‘a mixed blessing’, which is far from the intention of its originator, the cartoonist George Du Maurier (Punch, 9 November 1895).

Du Maurier, that grand old bohemian, was 61, and dead within a year. I think the joke is still funny, and so is one from seven years earlier, of the couple on a park bench, next to an old gent reading his paper: Edwin (suddenly, after a long pause): ‘Darling!’ Angelina: ‘Yes, darling!?’ Edwin: ‘Nothing, darling. Only darling, darling!’ [Bilious Old Gentleman feels quite sick.]

But now I come to think of it, to use curate’s egg otherwise than as ‘mixed blessing’ would be hard. Indeed the Oxford English Dictionary defined it as ‘a type of something of mixed character (good and bad)’, quoting the Minister’s Gazette of Fashion, 1905: ‘The past spring and summer season has seen much fluctuation. Like the curate’s egg, it has been excellent in parts.’

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