Egg on your face: Where did that saying come from?

Ever wonder where a certain phrase or saying came from? Words have meaning and often more power when clustered together, but certain phrases are well just weird.

This morning, I gave my daughter breakfast. We tried something new, and to my delight she loved her eggs. :) Yay. Since I have a hubby that's allergic to eggs, I just don't fix them that much. Unless it's for myself.

Anyways, my baby girl ended up with egg on her face. Not just her face, but smeared across her forehead. It got me to thinking, where did that saying come from? Someone had to start it sometime and I know the meaning, but it's kind of a weird phrase. I have to research little tidbits of information and things just like for my stories. If you are writing a historical, you don't want to use a word that hasn't been used yet. Something too new for the world you are building will destroy the reader experience, so this makes accuracy very important.

The internet makes my life so much easier. If I begin to wonder about something, I just google it. So as for the phrase egg on your face, I found my answers here:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-egg2.htm

Here is the meaning:

It often implies that you have made a serious mistake, but more strictly it indicates that something you have done (or some turn of events) has left you looking embarrassed or foolish

And when do you think it came into being? Only fifty years ago or so according to this article:
It feels like one of those expressions that have been around for ever, but the evidence suggest that it dates only from the middle of last century. It’s definitely American in origin, though now widely known wherever English is spoken.

I know of two suggestions for where it came from. The late John Ciardi suggested an origin in the lower-class and more rowdy kind of theatrical performance, in which an incompetent actor would have been pelted with eggs and forced off the stage. The other is that it was a comment on a minor social gaffe at a meal, when poor manners or sloppy eating left egg around your mouth.

As so often the origin is obscure but this newspaper story suggests that the latter is more likely, and that it began as US teenage slang:

A peek at the script turned up these gems, which Jane says are in the vocabulary of most any 15-year-old these days: “Hold your lava, Vesuvius!” (To a talkative friend). “There I was — with egg on my face!” (describing embarrassment).

The Bee (Danville, Virginia), 27 Aug. 1941.


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The internet is very cool at times. :)

Are you a visionary?

Are you a visionary? This is the type of person I want to be. Why?-- you ask.

When you look up the word in a dictionary it defines visionary as:

1.A person whose ideas, plans, etc. are impractical, too idealistic, or fantastic; dreamer.
2.A person of strong and creative imaginative power and, often, the ability to inspire others.

So who wants to be impractical, to have unrealistic ideas? It makes no sense to ser unachievable goals, to have such high and lofty dreams that it's unrealistic. Or is it? This type of person often has such a positive influence that others find them inspirational. They follow their lead and they too begin to dream.

Visionaries see the world as beautiful and try to make it even more beautiful during their lifetime. I think what helps to seperate them from the rest of the pack is that they don't merely react to what life throws at them. They envision a future for themselves, they ask themselves where they want to be in one-five years down the raod and set goals for themselves. Visionaries see what needs done to get from here to there and they make changes in theor lives to make their tomorrow happen.

I remember reading articles aboout CEO's and other high power executives who managed to seperate themselves from everybody else. One of the things these people did regularly was to keep a long list of lifetime goals an read it often.

So in parting, what I see as the most important characteristics to being a visionary are:

1.Thinking outside the box and being creative
2.Setting Goals and working towards them.
3.Giving back to those around us or making the world a better place.
4.Understanding that it won't be an easy road to follow, but there really is no such thing as being too idealistic, or too fantastic a dreamer.

May all your dreams come true.