I know for a fact that I am right, but if not, I’ll be the first to eat crow.”

Most likely, you have heard this idiom at one time or another.

What does it mean?

Well, maybe this will shed some light on it for you.

The term in Wikipedia is defined as: “to display total humility, especially when shown to be wrong.”

Makes sense.

But, where did the quirky saying come from or originate?

According to World Wide Words,

The origin seems fairly obvious: the meat of the crow, being a carnivore, is presumably rank and extremely distasteful, and the experience is easily equated to the mental anguish of being forced to admit one’s fallibility.”

In addition, according to Wikipedia, there is another possible source for this saying’s origin:

Another possible connection comes from a short story by Rudyard Kipling. In his story ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ Morrowbie Jukes falls into a place from which he cannot escape. Another man trapped there catches wild crows and eats them, but Morrowbie in his pride declares, ‘I shall never eat crow!’ After days of nothing to eat, his hunger and desperation finally forces him to do what he swore he would never do – literally eat crow.”

There you have it. Whether you eat crow or humble pie, occasionally we find ourselves needing to retract our stubborn opinions or perspectives and humble ourselves that we may just be in error.

Proverbs 11: 12 - “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with the humble is wisdom.”

Psalm 25:9 – “He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.”

The most common origin that people associate with this term is this:

Samuel Mudd was a physician who practiced medicine in Charles County, Maryland during the Civil War. He was awakened by two men at 4 a.m. on the morning of April 15, 1865. Dr. Mudd did not realize that the patient with a broken leg was the well-known actor, John Wilkes Booth; had no idea Booth had suffered the injury at Ford’s Theatre while jumping onto the stage after sending a bullet crashing into the skull of Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Mudd set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg.  Eventually, while searching for Booth, the police discovered that Booth had made his way to Dr. Mudd’s home.  Once the police arrived at the doctors home, Booth had been long gone.  But, Dr. Mudd was arrested for aiding Booth and was convicted of conspiracy in the assasination of President Lincoln, and with haboring John Wilkes Booth and his accomplice David Herold. He and was merely a kindly country doctor, unwittingly swept up in the vengeful hysteria following the war-time assassination of the president.

Andrew Johnson eventually pardoned Samuel Mudd in 1869 and he was released from prison, but the doctor’s conviction was never overturned. Richard Mudd began a campaign to restore the good name of his grandfather, but was only partially successful. He persuaded several states to pass resolutions proclaiming Dr. Mudd’s innocence, and Presidents Carter and Reagan wrote letters affirming their belief that the doctor was blameless. Both presidents, however, said they could not officially overturn the decision of the military court, leaving the controversy, and Dr. Mudd’s reputation, to the ultimate judgment of historians.

While this is the more common association with that phrase, it is not the original source. The origin actually dates back to 1823. Its earliest known recorded instance in 1823 an is in fact based an obsolete sense of the word ‘mud’ meaning ‘a stupid twaddling fellow’

Mud – a stupid twaddling fellow

To say that one’s “name is mud” is to say that “one is discredited”.  That being said, it is really easy to see why it’s origin has been more commonly associated with Dr. Samuel Mudd.

You always come across little odd sayings that we all know what they mean, but many wonder how we got them. This is my first entry in what I hope will become a long-standing series of entries.

“Kicking The Bucket”

Kick the bucket means to die.

The idiom kicking the bucket comes from a particular technique of suicide long ago. A person would tie a rope around his neck, secure the other end tightly to a branch while standing on a bucket. He would then proceed to kick the bucket out from underneath himself, thus killing himself and…kicking the bucket.

This is considered the mainstream origin, however, there is an additional possible origin to this particular idiom. This one dates back to the 16th Century. Slaughtered hogs, with their throats slit, used to be hung by their heels, which were tied to a wooden block and the rope then thrown over a pulley that hoisted the animals up. Because hoisting the block was similar to raising a bucket from a well, the wooden block came to be called a “bucket”, and the dying struggles of the hogs kicking against this ‘bucket’ supposedly gave birth to the phrase.