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To overegg something is to do more than is needed, or to add an extra bit that does not help — and often spoils the result. Though actually, people almost never use this word about real cooking. It comes from a British saying, over-egg the pudding: if you put too many eggs in a pudding, you do not make it better; you ruin it. From that picture, writers and speakers now say don’t overegg it about a speech, a story, a design, even an argument: stop adding; you have already done enough. It sounds informal and a bit British-clever. American English barely uses it. You will mostly meet it in British news and in offices that like that phrase.
畫蛇添足；搞過頭
組成over- (too much; excessively) + egg, from the phrase over-egg the pudding — adding too many eggs to a pudding and thereby ruining it.
同家族的字
- eggthe noun in the original pudding phrase
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
overeggverb/ˌəʊvəɹˈɛɡ/
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regionalChiefly in over-egg the pudding: to spoil (something) by exaggerating it, or an aspect of it; to overdo.
- But hard riding men, in strange countries, are apt now and then to over-egg the pudding, as the Yorkshire landlord told his Grace of Cleveland.
- [Seymour] Hersh vilifies the [Richard] Nixon–[Henry] Kissinger team for the way they adapted the handling of the Vietnam "peace" talks to the sordid claims of the presidential election time-table, but he over-eggs the omelette. It is reasonable to criticise them for having pretended to the American people (and perhaps themselves) that there was some way to negotiate a peace which would preserve the independence of south Vietnam. It is not reasonable to argue, as Hersh does, that the U.S. might have been able to bomb its way to such a durable peace in the spring of 1973, if the White House had not been hamstrung by the debilitating effects of the Watergate scandal.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。