thumb|right|Black crow painted on a plate

Eating crow is a colloquial idiom, The crow is a carrion-eater that is presumably repulsive to eat in the same way that being proven wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow. as being unfit for eating. Scavenging carrion eaters have a long association with the battlefield; "They left the corpses behind for the raven, never was there greater slaughter in this island," says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Along with buzzards, rats, and other carrion-eating scavenging animals, there is a tradition in Western culture going back to at least the Middle Ages of seeing them as distasteful (even illegal at times) to eat, and thus naturally humiliating if forced to consume against one's will. The OED V2 says the story was first published as "Eating Crow" in San Francisco's Daily Evening Picayune (3 December 1851), but two other early versions exist, one in The Knickerbocker (date unknown),

A similar British idiom is to eat humble pie. another bird species related to crows. There is a similarity with the American version of "umble", since the Oxford English Dictionary defines crow (sb3) as meaning "intestine or mesentery of an animal" and cites usages from the 17th century into the 19th century (e.g., Farley, Lond Art of Cookery: "the harslet, which consists of the liver, crow, kidneys, and skirts)."

South Australian croweater

A popular Australian demonym for South Australian people is "croweater". The earliest known usage dates to 1881 in the book To Mount Browne and Back by J. C. F. Johnson who writes: "I was met with the startling information that all Adelaide men were croweaters… because it was asserted that the early settlers… when short of mutton, made a meal of the unwary crow". According to a newsletter of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, early settlers did in fact eat cockatoo and parrots. How they became known as crow eaters instead is unknown but notably this term appears after the American usage in 1850 but does not carry the same idiomatic or pejorative meaning of being proven wrong.

Notable examples of use

thumb|right|upright=1.2|"The Crow Banquet," a [[political cartoon by Theodore Langguth published in The Wasp mocking U.S. Senator Stephen M. White and fellow California Democrats, September 8, 1894]]

The following examples illustrate notable uses of the idiom after its origin in the 1850s.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) used this concept in his short story "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" (1885). Morrowbie Jukes, a European colonist in India, falls into a sand-pit from which he cannot escape. Another man, a native Indian, is also trapped there who catches wild crows and eats them, saying "Once I was Brahmin and proud man; and now I eat crows." Morrowbie Jukes is also reduced to eating crow.

After incumbent Harry S. Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 United States presidential election despite many media predictions of a Dewey victory, The Washington Post sent a telegram to the victor:

On the night of 7 November 2000, after the polls had closed for the 2000 United States presidential election, CNN predicted Al Gore would win Florida and the presidency. Later, CNN retracted the call and cited Florida as being too close to call before finally awarding Florida to George W. Bush. Anchor Jeff Greenfield likened CNN's error to eating crow. Many other American newspapers retracted and were also said to eat crow.

See also

  • Foot in Mouth Award
  • Humble pie

Notes

  • When Eating Crow Was an American Food Trend, Atlas Obscura, Anne Ewbank