A good egg is a reliable, trustworthy, and supportive person who doesn’t have a big ego. They are emotionally strong and don’t create obligations. Rotten eggs are manipulative and self-serving. The terms are metaphors based on the idea that first impressions can be deceiving.
A good egg could be something you order for breakfast, but it could also be the person sitting across the table. Such a person is one heck of a decent human being. There are many people running around the world who are reasonably good people, but that’s not enough to be called a good egg.
This phrase refers, first of all, to someone who is absolutely reliable and trustworthy. Good eggs don’t tell secrets, especially embarrassing ones. They show up when they say they will, especially when the thing they show up for is more to provide support for someone else than to have fun. Good Eggs probably won’t ask to borrow money in the first place, but if they do, the lender can rest assured that they’ll be repaid on time, and will no doubt also get a gift certificate to a really nice cafe.
Everyone likes a good egg, not necessarily because of a sparkly personality, but because it always has a friend. Good eggs don’t have big egos. He’s likely to be the quiet worker in the office who turns in work early to help someone who’s struggling and doesn’t mind when the boss praises that worker’s efforts and not his. However, that’s not to say that good eggs are easy to pass. They are emotionally strong, which means their good-hearted actions are not attempts to create obligations.
For every good egg there is a bad one. Rotten eggs are always out on their own. Everything they do, even if it appears to benefit others on the surface, feeds directly into their profits. Loan money to a bad egg and it will be repaid in an emotional manipulation designed to make the lender feel bad for expecting to see the money again. Tell a rotten egg a secret, especially an embarrassing one, and it will only be kept if it also casts a negative light on the rotten egg.
It might go without saying that good and bad eggs are opposites, but why these people are called eggs isn’t so obvious. The terms good egg and bad egg make sense when considered not only as idiomatic expressions but also as metaphors. Eggshells are just the surface of the egg, just as people’s first impressions are based largely on surface detail.
It’s not until the egg is cracked that what’s inside is revealed. A very well dressed and well spoken person could turn out to be rotten inside or pure goodness through and through. One is a bad egg and the other is good.
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