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A Fox one day spied a beautiful bunch of ripe grapes hanging from a vine trained along the branches of a tree. The grapes seemed ready to burst with juice, and the Fox's mouth watered as he gazed longingly at them.
The bunch hung from a high branch, and the Fox had to jump for it. The first time he jumped he missed it by a long way. So he walked off a short distance and took a running leap at it, only to fall short once more. Again and again he tried, but in vain.
Now he sat down and looked at the grapes in disgust.
"What a fool I am," he said. "Here I am wearing myself out to get a bunch of sour grapes that are not worth gaping for."
And off he walked very, very scornfully.
There are many who pretend to despise and belittle that which is beyond their reach.
Comments
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!"
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".
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