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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”. | 
