Meaning
To presume to explain or advise a person who knows far more about the subject than you do; almost always a rebuke, most often in the negative ('you can't teach your grandmother to suck eggs'). Cambridge marks it UK and disapproving. It rests on the old habit of eating raw eggs, pierced and sucked or drunk - a skill no grandmother needed taught. Humorous and proverbial; gently mocks the adviser's presumption rather than insulting the person advised. Regional use: British English (understood generally).
Origin
First recorded in Captain John Stevens's 1707 translation of the Spanish satirist Quevedo: 'You would have me teach my Grandame to suck Eggs.' Jonathan Swift used it in his satire on cliched polite conversation (published 1738, written in the first decade of the 18th century), and Nathan Bailey defined it in his Dictionarium Britannicum (1736), proof that it was already proverbial. It displaced an older English saying, 'teach your grandame to grope ducks', recorded in Cotgrave's 1611 French-English dictionary, and sits beside equivalents such as the Latin 'sus Minervam' - a sow instructing Minerva, goddess of wisdom. The literal background is simply that raw eggs were a familiar, healthful food that older people had eaten all their lives.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- teach one's grandmother to suck eggs
- teach your grandma to suck eggs
- teach your granny to suck eggs
Usage Examples
- Explaining compost to a woman who has run an allotment for forty years is teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.
- I resisted the urge to coach the retiring editor on headline writing; there was no point teaching my grandmother to suck eggs.
- He was five minutes into explaining bridge conventions when his grandmother dryly asked who had taught whom to play cards.