The Fox and the Grapes

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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"{fact}.

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!"

[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".

In the original Greek, the phrase is "όμφακες εισίν" (omphakes eisin), the word omphax having both the literal meaning of an unripe grape and the metaphorical usage of someone too young.