As We Say It

"Oh, don't listen to him — those are crocodile tears." The CEO appears on television looking devastated about the layoffs. The politician dabs at their eyes while announcing budget cuts. Your teenager weeps inconsolably about their phone being confiscated. In each case, someone nearby mutters "crocodile tears," and everyone understands: the grief is fake. The sadness is performed. The weeping is a manipulation strategy, not an emotional response.

It's a beautifully specific phrase. Not just "fake tears" or "pretend sadness," but crocodile tears — as if the particular brand of reptilian insincerity matters. And it turns out, it does. Because the story behind this phrase is two thousand years old, spans three continents, and hinges on a biological quirk that scientists didn't confirm until 2007.

The Wrong Version

The common assumption is that "crocodile tears" is purely mythological — that ancient people invented a fable about weeping crocodiles, the phrase caught on, and there's nothing more to it than a colourful lie that became a useful metaphor.

This is half right. The ancients did tell stories about weeping crocodiles. But here's the part that most people get wrong: the crocodiles were not entirely fictional. They really do produce tears. The myth wasn't about whether crocodiles wept. It was about why.

The Real Story

The legend of the weeping crocodile is ancient, and it appears in remarkably similar forms across cultures that had no contact with one another. The core of the story is this: a crocodile, having seized and killed its prey, weeps as it devours the victim — crying with apparent sorrow even as its jaws are crunching through bone and flesh. The tears are a sign of false remorse. The crocodile is sad about the killing it is very much in the process of enjoying.

One of the earliest surviving accounts comes from a ninth-century Byzantine encyclopaedia known as the Bibliotheca of Photios I, Patriarch of Constantinople, which described the crocodile's habit of weeping over the heads of the men it had eaten. But the legend was almost certainly older than that. Ancient Greek and Roman writers were familiar with the Nile crocodile and its fearsome reputation, and travellers' tales about its behaviour circulated throughout the classical world.

The phrase entered English through Sir John Mandeville's Travels, a fourteenth-century book of fantastical travel accounts that was wildly popular despite being largely fictional. Mandeville — who may or may not have been a real person — described crocodiles that "slay men and eat them weeping." The image stuck. By the sixteenth century, "crocodile tears" was a common English expression. Shakespeare used a version of it in Othello, and Edmund Spenser deployed it in The Faerie Queene in 1590.

But here's where the story takes a turn that the medieval writers could never have anticipated. In 2007, a neurologist at the University of Florida named D. Malcolm Shaner conducted what appears to be the first rigorous scientific study of crocodilian lacrimation — which is to say, he watched alligators eat and checked whether they cried.

They did.

Shaner and his colleague Kent Vliet observed captive alligators and caimans during feeding and documented that several of the animals produced tears while eating. Not from sadness, obviously — reptiles are not, as far as neuroscience can determine, troubled by existential guilt over their dietary choices. The tears appear to be a mechanical side effect of eating. When a crocodilian opens its jaws wide to crush and swallow large prey, the movement compresses the lacrimal glands, which sit just behind the eye. The physical act of eating squeezes out tears. The harder the bite, the more tears are produced.

So the medieval travellers who reported that crocodiles wept while eating were, against all odds, describing something that actually happens. They got the observation right. They just got the interpretation spectacularly wrong. The crocodile wasn't crying because it felt bad. It was crying because chewing is hard.

There is, incidentally, a human medical condition that mirrors this phenomenon exactly. It's called "crocodile tears syndrome," or Bogorad's syndrome, and it occurs when the facial nerve is damaged — typically after Bell's palsy or surgical injury. The nerve fibres that control salivation get tangled with those that control tear production, and the result is a person who cries every time they eat. It's named, obviously, after the crocodile. The crocodile, had it known, would probably not have been flattered.