Sour grapes

Reader question:

Please explain “sour grapes” in this passage:

Talk about a clear case of sour grapes! When Bob’s girl friend left him to marry another man, he went around telling anybody who would listen that he left her because she wasn’t good enough for him.

My comments:

The case of sour grapes here refers to a situation where one doesn’t take defeat gracefully, not a real caseload of the fruit.

In other words, Bob is a sore loser who has to find excuses for his failure instead of giving credit to the winner. He could’ve wished his former girl friend good luck and moved on without muttering a word – instead of turning himself into a whole bunch of sour grapes.

Which leads us back to the idiom itself. “Sour grapes” is a term from the famed Aesop’s Fable. In the story, a fox saw a bunch of ripening grapes hanging high up on the vines and wanted to have them. So, one, two, three, heave-ho the fox jumped up in order to bring the grapes to the ground. But the grapes were high. The fox could not reach them, no matter how hard he tried. So in the end the fox gave up, saying to himself as he left: “The grapes are sour anyway. They’re not ripe yet.”

The moral of the story? It’s easy to badmouth anything we can’t have for ourselves.

Here are two examples of “sour grapes” in recent news:

1. A CONSERVATIVE parliamentary candidate has called the decision of a councillor to quit the party “sour grapes”.

Robert Rankin, who represents Hucknall East for Ashfield District Council, resigned in protest at the budget proposed by Tories at the county council. He said the planned £33m of cuts were “a disgraceful attack on the elderly and vulnerable”.

Mark Spencer, Conservative parliamentary candidate for Sherwood, rounded angrily on the councillor.

He told the Evening Post: “I am upset with him for resigning like he has without speaking to any Conservative county councillors about it.

“It seems a little bit of sour grapes because he was not successful in getting elected to the county council. I don’t want to lose any councillors but if I was going to pick one to lose, he would be the one.”

- ThisIsNottingham.co.uk, November 25, 2009.

2. A literary historian has written a book claiming Jane Austen may have become romantically involved with a clergyman while on holiday in Devon.

Although the author never married, the romantic content of many of her novels has fuelled speculation about her life and relationships.

Dr Andrew Norman claims Austen met up with Rev Samuel Blackall in 1802, while she was staying in Sidmouth.

He said his theory was based on Austen’s letters and county records.

Dr Norman, whose biography Jane Austen: An Unrequited Love was published recently, said: “I was puzzled by the fact that Jane Austen wrote about love and people getting together and the anguish involved in that.

“I thought I’d have a look at her own life to see what it was like.”

Jane Austen is thought to have had a relationship with Thomas Lefroy, who may have been the inspiration for the character of Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, when she was 21.

Their friendship was depicted in the 2007 film Becoming Jane.

But Dr Norman believes that after Mr Lefroy returned to Ireland she was introduced to Samuel Blackall, a young clergyman, in 1798.

“It looks from Jane’s letters that she would have liked to have gone further with him,” Dr Norman commented.

“But he disappeared for a while.

“According to family accounts, four years later she was staying with her parents in south Devon when she met up with a clergyman who was staying with his brother, a doctor, in Totnes.”

Dr Norman said he then searched the Devon County records.

“To my amazement I found a Dr Blackall in Totnes at the exact time Jane was staying near there.”

The records showed Dr Blackall had an older brother called Samuel.

He said Rev Blackall was “interested in making a nearer acquaintance” with Ms Austen but that he later went on to marry someone else.

“Jane wrote some fairly sarcastic comments about the marriage, as if it was sour grapes,” said Dr Norman.

He also claimed that Ms Austen may have had a rival for Rev Blackall’s affections in her sister Cassandra.

“In one novel she describes a bitter rivalry between two sisters and she wrote a poem entitled Cassandra, also about rivalry.”

Love, says the poem, “is the cause of many woes/It swells the eyes and reds the nose/And very often changes those/Who once were friends to bitter foes.”