How many crocodile tears are in a crocodile year?

by | Jul 31, 2018 | Daily conversations, Let's laugh!, Understanding the dictionary | 0 comments

Why do crocodile tears get such a bad reputation? If you shed crocodile tears, they’re not real tears, you’re just faking sadness and your tears are fake tears. I’m sure sad crocodiles shed real tears just like any rhino. How do I know? Well, because bees and butterflies like to drink crocodile tears – Yam! Tasty crocodile tears! – and the crocodile lets them. What kind of crocodile would let a bee drink its tears? A genuinely sad crocodile, or in other words, a crocodile who is too sad to care that there is a bee sitting on its eye.

But I was curious who started this falsehood about crocodile tears being fake tears, and here’s what I found out. There is a tale – A TALE? Well, that explains everything. Popular tales very rarely know what they’re talking about; in terms of facts, I mean – that the crocodile moans and sighs like a person in deep distress, to tempt travelers to go to it, and then, while devouring the gullible traveler, the crocodile sheds tears. Oh, a real method actor crocodile!

So there you have the truth about why crocodile tears are fake tears. I think my theory about the truthfulness of crocodile tears is much more believable than this ancient tale that promotes falsehoods about crocodiles.

And here’s a crocodile curiosity that speaks volumes about people who don’t know what they’re talking about but they talk anyway. There was this ancient writer called Achilles Tatius, and he said that the number of crocodile teeth equals the number of days in the year.

That would make sense if:

– he tried to count a crocodile’s teeth but he couldn’t count, so he got the number wrong

– or he was under the mistaken impression that the Roman year was a really short year, which it wasn’t. If a year had as many days as a crocodile has teeth, which is around 70, I would be really old by now. In fact, not even alive. But since I’m just about the right age according to the number of Roman years that have passed since I was born, which is…um…roughly, half the number of teeth a crocodile has, then I can only conclude that Achilles Tatius tried and obviously succeeded to count the number of teeth of a mythical crocodile, which is nothing like an actual crocodile. And if so, he should have been more specific in his statement and saved this poor girl – me – the trouble of trying to understand him thousands of years later.

See you,

Misty