So I'm watching some 'Glee' last night, and at one point Kurt said the phrase "eat your heart out." And this morning I woke up thinking about how disturbing a thing this is to say. Seriously. Think about it for a second. I'll wait.
Gross.
I wanted to know the origin of this phrase, so I turned to the interwebs for help. I'll tell ya, I wasn't thrilled with some of the answers. A lot of people seem to think it has to do with eating a whole lot, but that sounds even grosser and I don't believe that's true at all.
The best definition came from Scorpio Tales - "The ancients believed that sorrow or envy were bad for the heart, and would eat away at it, each sigh draining blood from the organ. This idea made its way to England and became well established - Shakespeare often refers to it, as in, 'Might liquid tears, of heart-offending groans, / Or blood-consuming sighs recall his life, / I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans, / Look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs' (Henry VI, part 2, III.ii). We still describe someone as broken-hearted by grief. By the beginning of the 20th century, to eat your heart out was well-established as a term for pining; but more recently, it has also been used as a cry of triumph when someone else has cause to envy the speaker."
Not great, but hopefully it's enough to get my mind off the disturbing nature of it.
I'm having a difficult time choosing which picture to use for this post. I don't want to look for pictures of people eating hearts. Instead, as often happens when thinking hard about a particular word or phrase, it lost all meaning for me. Which led me to this gem:
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