n [ sing ]
a thing that is partly good and partly bad. The phrase comes from a cartoon in the British magazine Punch in 1895, in which a nervous young curate (= priest) is having breakfast with a bishop . The bishop says ‘I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg there’ and the curate, not wanting to upset the bishop, replies, ‘Oh no, my Lord! … Parts of it are excellent!’:
Their investment plan shows the familiar curate’s egg pattern of some bits doing well and some bits doing badly.