You might have heard the saying that a person is weeping ?crocodile tears?. It means that the person is pretending to be sorrowful when he doesn?t actually feel so. But why crocodile tears? The expression goes back to the Middle Ages, when it was believed in Europe that a crocodile actually wept while luring its prey before catching it. Travellers who had gone to Africa and Asia wrote popular accounts of incidents in which they had apparently seen a cocodile shedding tears before catching an animal. That?s how the expression came into being.