The Rice University Neologisms Database

The muscle with two heads or tendinous attachments on the front of the upper arm, which bends the fore arm. Said coworker claims that the term is popular, although I do not anyone who has ever heard this term before. This coworker is a 19-year-old African-American female from a lower-middle class family and a poor educational background at a mediocre New Orleans public high school, so the term’s popularity might only exist within the African-American community. I asked a different African-American friend from another all-black New Orleans high school about the usage of the term. He said that he has heard the word used before, but that he has not heard it often. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people used the word egg to mean “anything that resembles an egg in shape or appearance.” However, this definition of egg has fallen out of popular usage and become virtually obsolete. In addition, when using the term egg in this way, people would always directly reference the object to which the egg was being compared. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary notes the following examples of this definition of egg: 1589 PUTTENHAM Eng. Poesie (Arb.) 105 The egge or figure ouall. 1635 A. STAFFORD Fem. Glory (1869) 89 The eggs of their eies are at their highest elevation. a1637 B. JONSON (R.) A puritan poacht, That used to turn up the eggs of his eyes. a1691 BOYLE (J.) There was taken a great glass-bubble wih a long neck, such as chemists are wont to call a philosophical egg. In each case, the egg-like object is specified. My use of “egg,” however, not only brings back this obsolete sense of egg, but does not require that the egg-like object be specified. The egg, in this case, refers solely to the bicep muscle, and the word “bicep” need not be used along with the term “egg.” The word egg follows a traditional pattern of metonymic shift established by other anatomical words such as amygdala. In this case, a recognizable shape/(more specifically a type of food with a recognizable shape) is used to represent a part of the body. The word amygdala derived from the Greek word meaning “almond” because the amygdala looks like an almond. In this case, the word “egg” has derived from the shape of the bicep muscle, which, when flexed, resembles the shape of an egg, as well as the firmness of an egg.