Case in point?
The phrase "crocodile tears." It's generally used to refer to a display of emotion that is superficial and inauthentic. But the phrase doesn't seem to have been a popular English-language metaphor until Shakespeare began using it in his plays. Imagine that. Beforehand, the phenomenon had been referred to in a fourteenth-century publication called Curious Creatures in Zoology by Sir John Mandeville (who is his own interesting little mystery of identity). He wrote:
...In that country...be great plenty of cockodrills, that is a manner of a long serpent, as I have said before. And in the night they dwell in the water, and on the day upon the land, in rocks and in caves. And they eat no meat in all the winter, but they lie as in a dream, as do the serpents. These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue.You can imagine how the wealthy educated classes might have read this and found it peculiar. So fast-forward to Shakespeare's time, when he's writing all these plays and trying to spice them up with little cultural-/world-references to seem smart and experienced. Needless to say, the masses who saw Shakespeare's works loved them, and took countless linguistic usages from them, including "crocodile tears," which became much more popular in the sixteenth century.
As for the actual biological truth of crying crocodiles, it seems that they occasionally shed tears after eating their prey to shed any excess salt in their systems, but this is a purely physical response. Crocodiles don't actually feel remorse for eating creatures, I don't think.
Finally, just for kicks, here's a political cartoon drawn by Bernhard Gillam, depicting Ulysses S. Grant crying over the persecution of Russian Jews to try and persuade voters to elect him to a third term:
-Taken from Puck Magazine, 1882
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