phrases

[johndeery]

teach your gran to suck eggs. what dose it mean

[jno]

the idea is that someone your gran's age would have learnt how to suck eggs 50 years ago, so it's wasting time, and also a bit of thinking you can teach things to someone who actually knows a lot more than you. Not that I even know what sucking eggs involves; I'd better ask Gran. 

[Quizmonster]

Click http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tea1.htm for further information on the phrase. It appears to have originated in Spain, so perhaps Spanish grannies had different eating-habits from our own dear home-grown ones!

[THECORBYLOON]

I was telt it come from when it was popular to paint eggs at Easter. It was the grannies who had the job of sucking out the eggs and the wee ones would then paint the empty eggs. I'm not sure why grannies were adept at it but. 

[flaming]

Grannies might have been    rotten    at it, but they might have had the sitting-down fiddly jobs to do whilst minding the little ones.  One has to pin-prick a hole in the egg-shell ( I'm not sure if it is just one end or both)  then suck out the contents, so it was a job that should be done carefully and thoroughly.

[jno]

sorry to hijack your threat here johndeery, but - TCL, is ending a sentence with 'but' Scottish? I've heard Australians do that but didn't know anyone else did.

[THECORBYLOON]

I don't know if it's more of a Glaswegian thing rather than Scots but there may be others who may know more. 

[flaming]

I was lost there for a minute!  When writing, I often end a sentence with 'but' with a row of dots after, trailing off so as to let readers draw their own conclusion or to denote puzzlement as to what else to think.  I thought TCL was meaning that but didn't put all the dots, but......