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Eating Crow, Hat, and other indigestibles

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  • Eating Crow, Hat, and other indigestibles

    EATING CROW
    And other indigestibles

    When you have made a serious error and need to acknowledge it humbly, it is highly probable that the expression you use to describe the process has something to do with food.
    The best-known traditional expression of this type in the US is to eat crow. The origin seems fairly obvious: the meat of the crow, being a carnivore, is presumably rank and extremely distasteful, and the experience is easily equated to the mental anguish of being forced to admit one's fallibility. But you may understand that my desire for accuracy has not led me so far as trying the experiment for myself, though taking a line through rook pie, which I tried once at an over-enthusiastic historical reconstruction, it seems a reasonable assumption. We need someone like the eccentric Victorian surgeon Frank Buckland, founder of the London Acclimatisation Society - dedicated to introducing useful new plants and animals into countries where they were unknown - whose hobby was eating his way through the animal kingdom, trying out delicacies such as roast giraffe and elephant trunk soup. He once returned from holiday to find that a leopard at the London Zoo had died and been interred in a flower bed; seizing a spade, he immediately dug it up to try it. He is on record as remarking that "the very worst thing he ever ate was a mole", but I can't find out what he thought of crows. Volunteers to make empirical observations should form an orderly queue.

    An article published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1888 claims that, towards the end of the war of 1812, an American went hunting and by accident crossed behind the British lines, where he shot a crow. He was caught by a British officer, who, complimenting him on his fine shooting, persuaded him to hand over his gun. This officer then levelled his gun and said that as a punishment the American must take a bite of the crow. The American obeyed, but when the British officer returned his gun he took his revenge by making him eat the rest of the bird. This is such an inventive novelisation of the phrase's etymology that it seems a shame to point out that the original expression is not recorded until the 1850s, and that its original form was to eat boiled crow, whereas the story makes no mention of boiling the bird.

    The British English equivalent is eating humble pie, which contains two ideas rolled in together, a portmanteau dish. The original umbles were the innards of the deer: the liver, heart, entrails and other second-class bits. It was common practice in medieval times to serve a pie made of these parts of the animal to the servants and others who would be sitting at the lower tables in the lord's hall. Pepys mentions it in his diary for 8 July 1663: "Mrs Turner came in and did bring us an Umble-pie hot out of her oven, extraordinarily good". However, it seems it was not until the nineteenth century that the expression humble pie appeared in the sense we now know, and some have reasoned that it did so as a deliberate play on words. If so, it was a very small play. The word umbles is a variant form of an old French term noumbles, (originally from Latin lumulus, a diminutive of lumbus, from which we also get loin and lumbar); umbles seems to be derived from numbles by the process called metanalysis which, for example, turned a norange into an orange; umbles also sometimes appeared in medieval times and later in the form humbles. Contrariwise, the word humble (originally from the Latin humilem from which we also get humility) was frequently spelt and pronounced 'umble' from medieval times right down to the nineteenth century. So the figurative sense of umble pie could have appeared at almost any time since the medieval period; indeed, so close is the association that it is surprising that the OED's first citation dates only from 1830.

    The phrase to eat dirt, first attested in the 1850s, expresses the same idea as to eat crow and to eat humble pie. The oldest of them, and most probably the source of all the others, is to eat one's words, which first appears in print in 1571 in one of John Calvin's tracts, on Psalm 62: "God eateth not his words when he hath once spoken".

    Whilst we are on the subject of consuming unconsumables: the expression to eat one's hat, expressing one's complete confidence in the outcome being described - "if that horse doesn't win, I'll eat my hat" - dates in this form only from 1836, when it appeared in Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers: "If I knew as little of life as that, I'd eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole". According to the OED, the phrase used to appear sometimes in the form eat old Rowley's hat, though I've never seen it and the OED has no citations for it. Who Rowley was I suspect nobody knows. There was a Jacobean playwright named William Rowley and Thomas Chatterton's supposed medieval monkish poet was named Thomas Rowley, though it is just as probable that Rowley was a character in a story or some minor personage now quite forgotten. There were earlier expressions invoking one's hat in support of some assertion: by my hat (which turns up in Love's Labour Lost), my hat to a halfpenny, and I'll bet a hat, so it is possible that Dickens' formation may draw on one or other of these and on the then newish eat humble pie.

    To eat one's heart out, 'to worry excessively', as a figurative description which also vividly evokes the often intensely physical symptoms of worry, actually predates the English language, since it turns up in Homer's Odyssey (about 850 BC) and in writings by Pythagoras four hundred years later. Some proverbial sayings have a very long history indeed.

    World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996-. All rights reserved.
    Page created 25 July 1996; last updated 25 January 1997.

    Just a bit of background history behind the expressions as we prepare ourselves to watch the masses "Eat their Hats"

    And what's the sound they all make when they take that first bite?????????


    Umf !!!!



    <FONT SIZE=4>... Say Umf !!!!<SUP>tm</SUP> ...
    <FONT SIZE=1><SUP>tm</SUP> courtesy of ALBPM aka Darth Mahl [MU]<FONT SIZE=2>
    Last edited by ALBPM; 29 April 2002, 20:49.
    "Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself"

  • #2
    Hat is delicious with a little bit of creole seasoning.

    Comment


    • #3
      and BeanO to spare the rest of us!
      "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." -- Dr. Seuss

      "Always do good. It will gratify some and astonish the rest." ~Mark Twain

      Comment


      • #4
        Very funny indeed

        LOL

        But just so everyone knows, I have always been a believer, no way I am gonna eat hat because of Parhelia. I HAVE my doubts with respect to whether all alleged "information" neccesarily pertains to parhelia. I do believe we will hear something real soon, and I trust it will be great. Normal ppl like me, however, have no way of knowing how great exactly it'll be IMHO.

        I have stated once that I'd potentially change my uid to "moron", but that was only meant for the possibility that my doubts above were really stupid (i.e. it shoudl have been unequovically clear that they DID pertain to P. and how great P. would be).

        HatEatinMoron is a nice one too btw.

        Oh, anyone in the know of how the first bite sounds, obviously has some first hand experience. I do not.

        Umf the HatEatinMoron
        Join MURCs Distributed Computing effort for Rosetta@Home and help fight Alzheimers, Cancer, Mad Cow disease and rising oil prices.
        [...]the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time. - Veblen

        Comment


        • #5
          I apologize if this insults you but my warped sense of humor took over to try and lighten things up around here.

          It was not meant as an insult

          BTW - Welcome to MURC and there is no need to change your uid to "HatEatinMoron".

          And yes, I have eaten Hat in the past.

          So, for all those non-believers out there:


          <FONT SIZE=4>... Say Umf !!!!<SUP>tm</SUP>...as you take a bite outa that hat...
          <FONT SIZE=1><SUP>tm</SUP> courtesy of ALBPM aka Darth Mahl [MU] and Umfriend<FONT SIZE=2>
          "Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself"

          Comment


          • #6
            No aplogies needed

            at all

            Umf aka HatEatinMoron (thx to Rags and Darth )
            Join MURCs Distributed Computing effort for Rosetta@Home and help fight Alzheimers, Cancer, Mad Cow disease and rising oil prices.
            [...]the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time. - Veblen

            Comment


            • #7
              COOL!!!!! a True MURCer at heart
              "Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself"

              Comment


              • #8
                And that on someone who uses a nVidia based card.....

                I am jealous of that Mystique that my kids use though...

                Umf aka HatEatinMoron (thx to Rags and Darth )
                Join MURCs Distributed Computing effort for Rosetta@Home and help fight Alzheimers, Cancer, Mad Cow disease and rising oil prices.
                [...]the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time. - Veblen

                Comment


                • #9
                  As long as it has HP sauce on it, I can eat anything...

                  Oh and a nice V to wash it all down with (www.v.co.nz)

                  Cheers!

                  Mark

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