chicken or egg

English

Noun

chicken or egg (uncountable)

1. Alternative form of chicken and egg.
   • 1993, Nordal Åkerman, editor, The Necessity of Friction, Physica-Verlag, →ISBN, page 287:

     The dynamically naive would be worrying about the "chicken or egg" of this causal process.

   • 2013, Peter Brooker, “General Introduction: Modernity, Modernisms, Magazines”, in Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, Christian Weikop, editors, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, volumes III (Europe, 1880–1940), part I, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 9:

     What is suggestive about both positions, for present purposes, is that modernism and the avant-garde are understood as belonging to a common history of supersession. The differences between them consist not in the sequencing itself, so much as in the evaluation respectively of the chicken or egg of modernism and the avant-garde (or the reverse) in a continuous process of renewal and stability.

   • 2016, Paavo Monkkonen, Lucas Ronconi, “Comparative Evidence on Urban Land-Use Regulation Bureaucracy in Developing Countries”, in Eugenie L. Birch, Shahana Chattaraj, Susan M. Wachter, editors, Slums: How Informal Real Estate Markets Work, Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, →ISBN, part I (Comparative Perspectives), page 44:

     This is likely a recursive, two-way relationship—the “chicken or egg” of institutions and development referred to previously.