Englishgood egg
Meaning: A person who is basically good or sound, but who may be slightly peculiar or idiosyncratic.
Example: “Our landlord is a good egg; he fixed the heater on Christmas Eve.”
Origin: Grew directly out of the earlier insult "bad egg" — a worthless or dishonest person, on the logic that a rotten egg looks the same as a good one until it's opened — which was already British public-school and university slang by the mid-1800s. "Good egg" followed as the natural flip side, praising someone as sound and dependable rather than rotten underneath. The earliest documented use of "good egg" itself is in Rudyard Kipling's 1904 story collection Traffics and Discoveries, though the slang was almost certainly already circulating before he wrote it down.
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