Crocodile tears

The phrase derives from an ancient belief that crocodiles shed tears while consuming their prey and, as such, is present in many modern languages, especially in Europe, where it was introduced through Latin.

However, Topsell also refers to the older story that crocodiles wept during and after eating a man, repeating the standard Christian moral that this signified a kind of fake repentance like Judas weeping after betraying Jesus.

He also refers to the version about tricking prey in Henry VI, Part 2, Act III, Scene i, in which a character refers to the faked emotions of the Duke of Gloucester: "Gloucester's show / Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile / With sorrow, snares relenting passengers."

Shakespeare's contemporary Edmund Spenser also refers to the story in The Faerie Queene, writing of the "cruel crafty" creature "which, in false grief, hiding his harmful guile / Doth weep full sore, and sheddeth tender tears.

The fluid from their tear ducts functions to clean and lubricate the eye, and is most prominent and visible when crocodiles have been on dry land for a while.

[7]In 2006, neurologist Malcolm Shaner, assisted by Kent Vliet, a researcher at the University of Florida, decided to test the story that crocodiles, or their close relatives alligators and caimans, were likely to "weep" while feeding.

Studying animals in Florida's St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park, Vliet recorded seven caimans feeding.

The researchers suggest that the "weeping" may be caused by the hissing of warm air during feeding, which is forced through the sinuses, stimulating the animals' tear glands into emptying fluid into the eye.

A 1882 cartoon by Bernhard Gillam depicting Ulysses S. Grant courting Jewish voters by crying "crocodile tears" over the persecution of Jews in Russia. The cartoon contrasts Grant's expressions of outrage with his own earlier military order to expel Jews from within his lines . He received a majority of the Jewish vote in the 1868 presidential election and went on to place a record number of Jewish people into high office up to that point in time.
"Crocodile tears for Syria", cartoon by Carlos Latuff illustrating the concept
An eye of a saltwater crocodile