Every day I am grateful that the Wall Street Journal paywall prevents me from reading things that I don't actually want to read, that were commissioned or greenlit specifically to irritate people into reading.
Sometimes the grapes that are out of reach really are sour. Sometimes they were soured by design.
Also, the expression "sour grapes", as I have alluded to, comes from a fable attributed to Aesop, about a hungry fox who cannot reach some grapes, so he declares they are unripe and that he wouldn't "eat sour grapes" anyway.
The traditional interpretation, included in the coda in many extant versions, is that the moral of this fable is aimed at people who disparage what they cannot have in the first place.
But the fox comes off no worse for writing the grapes off?
But the fox comes off no worse for writing the grapes off?
The attempt to get the grapes was costly; a hungry animal used up calories for nothing. Deciding to walk away cuts those losses. The fox's sudden declaration that the grapes aren't worth eating is self-serving, sure, but it does not harm the fox.
Absent an omniscient storyteller who is conveniently there to tell us what the fox thinks of the situation, nobody would ever know what lie the fox makes up to walk away from a toxic situation.
A better cautionary tale about disparaging what is out of reach would require stakes to the derision, some harm done to the subject of desire/derision (like a person, not grapes) and some cost to the desirer/derider for the flippant 180.
In its canonical form, the fable of the Fox and the Grapes seems less like a cautionary tale for the covetous and more like useful advice for Tantalus.
One must imagine Tantalus petty.
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