Eat Crow

Volume 3. Issue 1. 

It’s been a while since my last post, so I decided to move on to volume 3. 

What was said? They are going to eat crow when they begin to realize their gaps…

Did someone really say that? Yes, a team member said it about a company who was far behind industry standards

What does it mean? It means you are proven wrong, typically through humiliation.

Origin:  The expression has to do with being proved incorrect, like “eat dirt”, “eat your hat/shoe” … all originating from “eat one’s words” which appears in print starting in 1571 in one of John Calvin’s tracts, on Psalm 62: “God eateth not his words when he hath once spoken.” Eating a “crow” is thought of as distasteful and the crow is seen as unfit for eating in the Bible, Leviticus Chapter 11.

To “eat crow” also has to do with humbling oneself to admit to being wrong (equivalent to a British expression “to eat humble pie”). The original phrase is believed to be “to eat boiled crow”, but either way, using the term “eat crow” to mean to be proven wrong, is thought to have first appeared in or around 1850. A story was published in the Saturday Evening Post called “Can you eat crow?” about a NY farmer whose boarders complained about being fed poorly and he responded saying he “kin eat anything” and the boarders tested him by asking if he would eat crow, to which he accepted the challenge but spiked it with Scotch and said “I kin eat crow, but i be darned if I hanker after it.”

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_crow
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/eatcrow.htm
http://linguisticmystic.com/2006/12/29/eating-crow-an-english-idiom-and-an-example-of-its-use-in-my-personal-life/

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