And let’s not forget a weird but fabulously useful way to get up-close-and- personal with our audience: hanging out with them online. the skill was to make a hole in either end of the egg, insert a needle to whip around and break the yolk, at which point it could be sucked (or blown) to enjoy, or just to empty it. Teaching grandmother to suck eggs is an English language saying that refers to a person giving advice to another person in a subject with which the other person is already familiar.

We need to draw a line in the sand between what prospects already know (so we stop talking already) and what they desperately need to know (so we can be truly helpful).

We need to have something new and valuable to tell our audience about how to compete in their market. The Wikipedia page on "Teaching grandmother to suck eggs" (cited in a comment beneath the original post above in a comment by Matt E. As B2B marketers we’re in the business of selling to world-leading egg-suckers—having never once put an egg in our own mouths. I have often jested with them for pressing me to eat eggs, that were boiled so much as to be blue, and told them that my teeth were too bad to chew bullets. Many years ago people would suck out the egg contents by piercing the egg at both ends and then sucking on one of the ends.

I’ve seen a couple of people who’ve felt somewhat sidelined when newer, younger teachers were invited to present ideas instead of them. Most likely the meaning of the idiom derives from the fact that before the advent of modern dentistry (and modern dental prostheses) many elderly people (grandparents) had very bad teeth, or no teeth, so that the simplest way for them to eat protein was to poke a pinhole in the shell of a raw egg and suck out the contents; therefore, a grandmother was usually already a practiced expert on sucking eggs and didn't need anyone to show her how to do it.All of which means that—drum roll—there’ll be times when we need to subvert the usual channels of communication. As for the Wikipedia article's surmise that sucking raw eggs was a practice limited to the old and toothless, that notion seems contrary to the historical record, too. The compulsion to prove that I know what I’m talking about (because I don’t) is going to be pretty irresistible. The spinning version makes perfect sense: even as late as the 1500s, all women learned how to spin, and many of them spent most of their waking hours with a spindle in their hands. In 1707, Francisco de Quevedo coined the expression “Teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs”—a colourful reference to the fact that Spanish grannies who’d lost their teeth were adept at sucking eggy goodness through a pinhole in raw eggs.

Cotton spinners will sometimes use a distaff, sometimes not, depending on how their cotton was prepared. Stevens, of Francisco de Quevedo (Spanish author): "You would have me teach my Grandame to suck Eggs". Let’s say I’m marketing to supply chain managers and I know nothing about supply chains—apart from the gleanings of a frantic Google session. We can intellectualise some of the bigger ideas and concepts in education – but classroom dynamics are all about details of speech, tasks, resources, routines. At some point, however, the logical metaphor lost favor, and the phrase mutated: instead of teaching your grandma something she knows better than you because she's been doing it since she was three years old, the phrase became about things that anyone with a modicum of intelligence can figure out how to do, if only they could come up with a reason to do them in the first place.Some of these cookies are essential, while others help us to improve your experience by providing insights into how the site is being used. The short-tailed weasel ( Mustela erminea) will put a small hole into an egg and then lap up the contents as they come oozing out.