Quote:
|
Originally Posted by swa(y)
well, sour grapes certainy got no hope of bein' fresh again.
|
oh sour means green i mean not ripe hm let's see...
The Fox and the Grapes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to:
navigation,
search
The Fox and the Grapes, illustrated by
Milo Winter in a 1919 Aesop anthology
The Fox and the Grapes
is a
fable attributed to
Aesop. The
protagonist, a
fox, upon failing to find a way to reach
grapes hanging high up on a vine, retreated and said: "The grapes are sour anyway!". The
moral is stated at the end of the fable as:
It is easy to despise what you cannot get.
The
English idiom "
sour grapes" - derived from this fable - refers to the denial of one's desire for something that one fails to acquire or to the person who holds such denial. Similar expressions exist in other languages. In
psychology, this behavior is known as
rationalization. It may also be called reduction of
cognitive dissonance.
In
colloquial speech the idiom is often applied to someone who loses and fails to do so gracefully. Strictly speaking, it should be applied to someone who, after losing, denies the intention to win altogether. The phrase is misused in all sorts of ways by people who do not know the original story and imagine it means something more general like "bitterness" or "resentment".
Frank Tashlin adapted the tale into a 1941
Color Rhapsodies short for
Screen Gems/
Columbia Pictures.
The Fox and the Grapes marked the first appearance of Screen Gems' most popular characters,
The Fox and the Crow.
Similar Persian (Iranian) idiom: "The cat who cannot reach the meat says it smells bad!" Or a Bengali phrase: "One who doesn't know how to dance says the floor is uneven!"
[edit] Unripe versus sour
The moral of the fable centers on the qualification by the fox, when he finds his desire unattainable. The word "sour" was probably chosen by the
translators in
Western Europe, writing during the
Victorian era. Study of older versions of the fable suggest that "unripe" might be a more literal translation, the idea being that the fox would come back later to try in earnest. The word "unripe" may have been replaced with "sour" by the fable's Victorian translators since the word "unripe", in Victorian society, might have been interpreted as an innuendo suggesting an as-yet unripe woman.
Another view is that "sour grapes" is brief and concrete, as compared with "unripe grapes".