Show notes

Mario and Twenty unveil the origin, confirm the meaning, and assess the value of "put all your eggs in one basket" — and it does not start on a farm. The oldest record in English is from 1662, in Giovanni Torriano's The Second Alphabet of Proverbial Phrases. Torriano was an Italian language teacher in London compiling Italian proverbs for English readers, and his entry reads: "to put all one's eggs in a panyard, viz. to hazard all in one bottom." A panyard is a basket. A bottom, in 1662, is a ship — not a crate in the hold, the hold itself. So the original warning is about putting all your cargo in one vessel, in an era when marine lending was real and there was no second ship. Then there is Cervantes, who gets three hundred years of credit he never earned. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations puts the eggs line in Sancho Panza's mouth. Go to Thomas Shelton's translation, the first into any language, and there are no eggs in it at all. What Sancho actually says is that the wise reserve something for tomorrow without venturing all upon one cast — and one cast means dice. Cervantes was writing about gambling. The eggs arrive a century later, when Peter Motteux swaps in an English proverb because he assumes English readers will not follow the Spanish one. Dice is a bet you chose. A basket is a thing you are carrying. The metaphor got gentler in translation. In 1894 Mark Twain wrote the most famous inversion of any proverb in American letters: the fool scatters his eggs, the wise man puts them all in one basket and watches it. That same stretch, one concentrated bet on the Paige typesetting machine destroyed him financially. He watched the basket. It took everything anyway. In 1952 a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at the University of Chicago settled the argument with math instead of philosophy, and won a Nobel for it. If you have a 401(k), there is a default fund in it you never chose, and it exists because of Harry Markowitz's paper. Also in this episode: what "China pays the tariff" has in common with an eighteenth-century translator, why ignorance is bliss might be the most powerful phrase ever spoken, Twenty ranking the holidays as the Miami Heat Big Three, and a Dictionary of Misinformation entry about the fan in your window. Then the appraisal — impact, speed and preference. The two of them do not start in the same place. Watch the video version on the Underdog Podcasts channel on YouTube. Every phrase gets a grade, and some of them get a mug: appraisethephrase.com/shop Appraise The Phrase is part of the Underdog Podcast Network.