Oh, fallible memory. A number of readers wrote to point out that last week's reference to the 1895 Punch magazine cartoon about the curate's egg was off on two counts. The ingratiating curate wasn't visiting his parishioners; he was a guest at the table of his bishop, and had particular reason to kowtow. And his praise surpassed the anodyne line "good, in parts" that I gave him. The precise caption (headlined True Humility) was this, including the exclamation points: "Right Reverend Host: I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr. Jones! The Curate: Oh no, my lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!"
"The point of the cartoon," reader David Antscherl notes, "is the degree to which this curate is willing to be sycophantic when his host notices and remarks on the bad egg in front of his guest." Nick Daniel says his father, who was a curate, remembers the cartoon well. "Presumably it was boiled egg at breakfast and the curate had stayed overnight. I think, in those days, that bishops vetted new curates over a couple of days. Maybe they still do, so perhaps there are still some 'good, in parts' eggs!"
Alan Smith has a half-memory of a similar reference to a curate and a bad egg in a Henry Fielding novel, either Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews, which would predate the Punch reference by 150 years. Should anyone spot a curate's egg in either book, do pass it along.
The expression remains in wide use, particularly in Britain. "This is a curate's egg," Derek Malcolm wrote in London's Evening Standard on Oct. 21, about the movie Coffee and Cigarettes, "but when it is good, it is very good indeed."
A few select captions have shown that kind of staying power, transcending their cartoons to become part of the language. Peter Arno struck pay dirt in The New Yorker in the early 1940s with his image of an airplane in ruins on the runway, the pilot parachuting to Earth, and scores of people rushing to put out the fire. The plane's designer is seen strolling cheerfully away from the wreckage, saying, "Well, back to the old drawing board."
That one popped up last month in a humour column by Jon Carroll in The San Francisco Chronicle: "If [Dick]Cheney is the sole incarnation of evil, as many suggest, Satan's only representative on the earthly plane, then the Hindu and Buddhist communities are going to have to, as they say, go back to the old drawing board."
Arno was also responsible for the exasperated expression, "This is a hell of a way to run a railroad," spoken originally to two train conductors by a passenger miffed about the quality of his dry martini. Massachusetts House Minority Leader Bradley H. Jones used a modified version last March in complaining that Democratic leaders wouldn't be around for a vote on gay marriage. "They're not on the front lines today making sure the votes are there. Heck of a way to run a railroad."
That's not even counting the cartoon characters who have entered the language, such as the reactionary, pontificating Colonel Blimp created by David Low in (coincidentally) The Evening Standard in the 1930s. In September, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe described a character as "an ecstatically sozzled Colonel Blimp type."
By the way, a 1950 New Yorker cartoon by Alex Graham (who later drew the comic strip Fred Basset) was the genesis of the standard alien-meets-Earthling line, "Take me to your leader." Graham's cartoon showed two aliens leaving their flying saucer and approaching a cow in a field: "Kindly take us to your President!" For a few hours this week, that might have been an especially difficult assignment.