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cry wolf
Idioms and Phrases
Raise a false alarm, as in Helen's always crying wolf about attempted break-ins, but the police can never find any evidence . This term comes from the tale about a young shepherd watching his flock who, lonely and fearful, called for help by shouting âWolf!â After people came to his aid several times and saw no wolf, they ignored his cries when a wolf actually attacked his sheep. The tale appeared in a translation of Aesop's fables by Roger L'Estrange (1692), and the expression has been applied to any false alarm since the mid-1800s.Example Sentences
âThe challenge is always, you donât want to cry wolf too soon, but you certainly donât want to wait until the wolfâs eating you, either,â he said of declaring a drought.
At the same time, to cry wolf â to misuse the term to try to intimidate people into silence while Israelâs atrocities continue in Gaza â is an abuse of the word antisemitism and a disservice to everyone who strives for a single standard of human rights â like the17 rabbis and rabbinical students who went to Capitol Hill last week urging a ceasefire and an end to the unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel.
That sort of description typically makes me urp; too many critics serve it up every week or two and they cry wolf, or masterwork, or not-to-be-missed too often to be trusted.
âWe donât want to cry wolf and say, âOh, weâre gonna get record amounts of rain, catastrophic flooding,â and then you get about half what you think.
In an extensive series of posts, Dr. Swain told her that it was âeasy to get caught up in the hype of viral social media postsâ but âcounterproductiveâ to cry wolf with âextreme claimsâ that might confuse and alarm the public.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American HeritageŸ Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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