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Idiom
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Lay an egg 彻底失败
The expression "to lay an egg" means to fail badly, completely.
The phrase comes from the ancient English game of cricket. A player who failed to score was said to make a duck's egg, because zero was shaped like a duck's egg. In the words of one British journal, "Out of the 11 Surrey batsmen who played against Nots yesterday, no less than five were credited with duck's eggs."
The phrase crossed the ocean and joined the American game of baseball, where zero was called a "goose egg". From this failure to make a score was born another expression for almost any kind of failure: "to lay an egg".
One does not have to be a ball player to "lay an egg". Anyone can do it. People can lay an egg in business, in politics, in the theatre -- wherever some idea, plan or programme turns out to be a failure. And the man who proposes the unsuccessful project is said to have "egg on his face" (显得愚蠢). In this case, the "egg on his face" is a mark of defeat and embarrassment.
This is as "sure as eggs is/are eggs" (毫无疑问), which is an old expression meaning, "for sure, without doubt".
The egg has given language many colourful expressions. After all, everything seems to have come from the primordial (最初的) egg, the one that scientists say exploded and created the Cosmos.
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