Idiom
curate's egg
Meaning
A thing which has good and bad parts, but is overall spoiled by the bad.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“The new movie is a curate's egg.”
“This vacation package is a curate's egg.”
“The local festival is a curate's egg this year.”
“The restaurant's menu is a curate's egg, with delicious appetizers but very poor main courses.”
“The updated software is a bit of a curate's egg because the new interface looks amazing but the system crashes every time I try to save my work.”
“Her latest painting is a curate's egg, showing beautiful colors in the sky but featuring a very messy and distracting foreground.”
“While the novel contains moments of genuine brilliance, it remains a curate's egg due to its disjointed narrative and weak character development.”
Examples
simple
“The new movie is a curate's egg.”
“This vacation package is a curate's egg.”
“The local festival is a curate's egg this year.”
contextual
“The restaurant's menu is a curate's egg, with delicious appetizers but very poor main courses.”
“The updated software is a bit of a curate's egg because the new interface looks amazing but the system crashes every time I try to save my work.”
“Her latest painting is a curate's egg, showing beautiful colors in the sky but featuring a very messy and distracting foreground.”
complex
“While the novel contains moments of genuine brilliance, it remains a curate's egg due to its disjointed narrative and weak character development.”
Origin
From a cartoon by the Franco-British cartoonist and author George Du Maurier (1834–1896) captioned “True Humility” in the 9 November 1895 issue of Punch magazine, in which a bishop says to his mealtime guest, a curate, “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!” The timid curate replies, “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!”.
Key words
Related idioms
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