A: Mary had to eat crow yesterday.

    B: Why?

    A: She talked to her new neighbor Joe as if he was an uneducated idiot, until she found out he was a college professor.

    Note: Eating crow is an American colloquial idiom, meaning humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proven wrong after taking a strong position. Crow is presumably foul-tasting in the same way that being proven wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow. The exact origin of the idiom is unknown, but it probably began with an American story published around 1850 about a slow-witted New York farmer. We have similar idioms such as to “eat dirt” and to “eat your hat” (or shoe), all probably originating from “to eat one’s words.”