英语词汇crocodile tears的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

crocodile tears. Crocodiles can’t shed real tears, but the myth arose in early times that the creature moaned and cried to attract the sympathetic and helpful, and then snatched and ate its saviors while “wepynge” (“weeping”), as British adven- turer and nature faker Sir John Maundeville, the first to record the legend, put it in about 1400. The story was repeated in Hakluyt’s Voyages (1600) and by many other writers including Shakespeare, and these hypocritical crocodile’s tears became a term for any feigned sorrow. The crocodile takes its name from the Greek kroke, “gravel,” and crilos, “worm,” the newly hatched animal resembling to early observers an oversized worm emerging from gravel on the banks of the Nile. In Africa the crocodile is sometimes called “the animal that kills while it is smiling.”

词汇	crocodile tears
词源	crocodile tears. Crocodiles can’t shed real tears, but the myth arose in early times that the creature moaned and cried to attract the sympathetic and helpful, and then snatched and ate its saviors while “wepynge” (“weeping”), as British adven- turer and nature faker Sir John Maundeville, the first to record the legend, put it in about 1400. The story was repeated in Hakluyt’s Voyages (1600) and by many other writers including Shakespeare, and these hypocritical crocodile’s tears became a term for any feigned sorrow. The crocodile takes its name from the Greek kroke, “gravel,” and crilos, “worm,” the newly hatched animal resembling to early observers an oversized worm emerging from gravel on the banks of the Nile. In Africa the crocodile is sometimes called “the animal that kills while it is smiling.”
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