Find yourself pacing anxiously about, a small paper cup grasped tightly in your hand? Welcome to the wonderful world of drug testing.

Not to fret. It does have socially redeeming value — to sort out the rotten eggs in our midst. If you have difficulty imagining the trouble one rotten egg can get into, witness the history of a simple word and how it ended up.

In Ancient Greece, an egg that didn’t hatch was called an ourion oon, “one thought to be impregnated by the wind.” Translated into Latin, however, it got confused with an ovium urinae, “an egg of urine or putrid liquid.”

Translated into Middle English, it became an adel eye, a “rotten egg” — adel(a) being the word at the time for “urine” — making it into an adel egg. It wasn’t long before the addle-egg stood for anything that was “good for nothing” or “spoiled.”

People like it so well, they started using it figuratively, as did Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, “Thy head has been beaten as addle as an egg.” From this, we got our addle-pate or addle-head, literally, a “urine head.” Shortened, it created the perfect descriptor for our currently addled drug testing policy —“confused and muddled.”

Not to fear. This too shall pass.