Eat Your Heart Out

the human heart, flickr

Eat your heart out—what does this phrase really mean? Wouldn’t it be kind of gross to rip a heart out of someone else’s chest and eat it? Yuck! And you certainly wouldn’t want to eat your own heart. Where did this phrase come from? Once you know its origins and true meaning, you should be able to use it more effectively in your own writing.

When you say eat your heart out to someone, you are wishing for that person to be consumed by the powerful emotion of greed or jealousy. Is this what the phrase meant when it was first used?

a broken heart, pixabay

Original Meaning of the Phrase
The heart is the center of very strong emotions. When we experience fear, shock, jealousy, or even grief, the heart will beat faster. Long ago, before people realized that strong emotion was what made their hearts race, they probably thought that the heart was somehow responsible for these strong emotions.

The heart is crucial to our survival. Think about it – if you remove your heart, you die. If you are eaten up with grief in a bad way, you might actually wish for death. Maybe this is why this particular phrase was linked with grief.

This phrase was first used in the Greek myth of Belarophon. This unfortunate grief-stricken individual was left eating his heart out after the deaths of his three children. The gods had turned on him in a fit of jealousy because of his success and caused his offspring to die.

This phrase was also used by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey. In these books, it also conveyed very profound grief. Even though I had to read these books while I was in school, I don’t specifically remember running across that particular phrase. But I don’t really remember anything about those books except their titles because I didn’t enjoy reading them.

Today it is used as a term to tell others to be jealous of what you have accomplished.

writing, www.pexels.com

Writing Prompts
How could you use this phrase in your fiction writing? Instead of using it to denote jealousy, why not use it to indicate grief? Maybe one of your characters could be a word fanatic and know the original meaning of the phrase. He could insist on always using it with its original meaning. Or you could have a character who loves to speak in phrases, and this could be his favorite one.

Why has the meaning of this phrase changed? Write a story showing how and why it changed.

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