"Go suck an egg" is a saying typically used similarly to "take a hike" or "piss off":

> Hey, you going to help me with this or what?

> Go suck an egg.

An few Ngram searches shows that "suck an egg" is only really used with the words ["go"](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*+suck+an+egg&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t2%3B%2C%2A%20suck%20an%20egg%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bwould%20suck%20an%20egg%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bto%20suck%20an%20egg%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bgo%20suck%20an%20egg%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BGo%20suck%20an%20egg%3B%2Cc0) and ["an"](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=suck+*+egg&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t2%3B%2Csuck%20%2A%20egg%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bsuck%20an%20egg%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bsuck%20the%20egg%3B%2Cc0) but I was not able to find any reference to the origin of the phrase.

An existing question on ELU asks about the origin of ["teaching grandma to suck eggs" ](http://english.stackexchange.com/q/31566/6006) but none of the answers directly discuss this usage of "suck eggs". When did this phrase become a common statement meaning "go away"? Why was *this* random activity associated with the idiom?