I recently attended a meeting of the governing board of my employer,
and we went out for a meal afterwards.
I was mentioning the slight sense of karmic repayment I feel at
doing something with a genuine social use, having in a previous job
been webmaster for S Club 7 and Westlife among others. One or two of
the people there (senior lawyers and such like) didn't recognise the
names.
So I was able to explain, to a retired judge, that S Club 7 were
"a popular beat combo
of the early 2000s". And he got the reference.
(Of course the Wikipedia page misses the point: the reason for the
thing to have happened, if it did, is that while the judge probably
knows perfectly well what a Beatle is, the quick summary still needs
to be read into the record for the benefit of future legal scholars
and lawyers.)
- Posted by DaveD at
09:53am on
19 March 2019
Oh, that's beautiful.
- Posted by Chris at
10:45am on
19 March 2019
It's a toss-up, these days, about which is as frequently quoted in complete misunderstanding of what it properly means: a popular beat combo or a curate's egg.
Lovely to have the chance to use one of them properly!
- Posted by RogerBW at
10:50am on
19 March 2019
I suspect that most people these days have never had a bad egg. I certainly haven't. (I've once or twice cracked one and thought "I don't like the smell of that", but never come close to eating one.)
- Posted by Owen Smith at
01:28pm on
19 March 2019
I'm only barely aware that eggs can go bad. And I've often wondered what a curate's egg is (but not enough to look it up).
- Posted by RogerBW at
01:57pm on
19 March 2019
Punch cartoon, 9 November 1895, by George du Maurier, under the title "True Humility".
Right Reverend Host: "I'm afraid you've got a bad Egg, Mr Jones!"
The Curate: "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!"
The point being that even a partly-bad egg is entirely inedible (the H₂S has percolated throughout); but many modern speakers fail to notice this, and use "curate's egg" as a variant of "mixed bag", whereas as originally used it's closer to "one bad apple ruins the barrel".
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