Crocodile tears

Crocodile tears (or superficial sympathy) are a false, insincere display of emotion such as a hypocrite crying fake tears of grief.

The phrase derives from an ancient belief that crocodiles shed tears while consuming their prey. While crocodiles do have tear ducts, they weep to lubricate their eyes, typically when they have been out of water for a long time and their eyes begin to dry out. However, evidence suggests this can also be triggered by feeding.

Bogorad's syndrome is a condition which causes sufferers to shed tears while consuming food, so has been labelled "crocodile tears syndrome" with reference to the legend.

The expression comes from an ancient anecdote that crocodiles weep for the victims they are eating. A collection of proverbs attributed to Plutarch suggests that the phrase "crocodile tears" was well known in antiquity: comparing the crocodile's behaviour to people who desire or cause the death of someone, but then publicly lament for them. The story is given a Christian gloss in the Bibliotheca by early medieval theologian Photios. Photios uses the story to illustrate the Christian concept of repentance. The story is repeated in bestiaries such as De bestiis et aliis rebus.

This tale was first spread widely in English in the stories of the travels of Sir John Mandeville in the 14th century.

In that country and by all Inde be great plenty of cockodrills, that is a manner of a long serpent, as I have said before. And in the night they dwell in the water, and on the day upon the land, in rocks and in caves. And they eat no meat in all the winter, but they lie as in a dream, as do the serpents. These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue.

A later writer, Edward Topsell, provided a different explanation for the tears, saying "There are not many brute beasts that can weep, but such is the nature of the crocodile that, to get a man within his danger, he will sob, sigh, and weep as though he were in extremity, but suddenly he destroyeth him." In this version, the crocodile pretends to be in distress to lure prey into a false sense of security. However, Topsell also refers to the older story that crocodiles wept during and after eating a man, repeating the standard Christian moral that this signified a kind of fake repentance like Judas weeping after betraying Jesus.

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