The Lawyer and The Egg

When I was in law school, my writing professor frequently preached to us one of the cardinal rules of the profession – never respond to an opponent’s argument by restating that argument.  By setting forth your opponent’s position in a brief, she told us,  you reinforce the principle in the mind of the reader.

Although I diligently followed this rule, I always felt a little suspicious that its importance was overstated.  People are smarted than that, I thought.

But yesterday I was finally convinced she was right, and that people (like me) are not that smart.  And it happened in the most unlikely of arenas – the kitchen.

While mixing up some cornbread, I took an egg out of the refrigerator and went to crack it.  Vaguely recalling a recent Jacque Pepin tutorial on making omelets, I tried to remember what Jacque had said about cracking eggs. Remembering something about hard edges and bowls,  I quickly took my egg and smashed it into the edge of the bowl.

It was only while I was picking shards of shell out of my bowl that I remembered Jacque had cracked his egg against the bowl as a demonstration of how NOT to do it.  Why?  Because the shell would shatter creating not only a health hazard (salmonella) but a mess.  Later he showed us the right way to do it by taking his egg and banging it against a flat surface (the counter top) — but I had forgotten that…