Sour grapes

Sour grapes is used to describe how a person feels when they want something, but they can’t get it, so they say it's not very good anyway.

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Idiom: Sour Grapes

Sour grapes is a term used to describe how a person feels when they want something but can’t get it, so they say it’s not very good anyway.


Think about a child who wants to have ice cream.

Their father tells them that they can’t have any.

The child gets angry, but the father sticks to his guns and says, ‘No ice cream today.’

The child walks off in a huff and says, ‘I didn’t want any ice cream anyway; the weather is too cold to have ice cream!’

The mother walks into the room and says, ‘Huh? Why the sour grapes!’

The child wants ice cream.

The child can’t have ice cream.

The child says it’s too cold to have ice cream today.

The child’s feeling is sour grapes.


This post is very simple and easy to read, likely to be understood by an average 5th-grader (age 10).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 97.

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.



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