Making a mountain out of a molehill is an

idiom An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a Literal and figurative language, figurative or non-literal meaning (linguistic), meaning, rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic speech, formulaic ...

referring to over-reactive, histrionic behaviour where a person makes too much of a minor issue. It seems to have come into existence in the 16th century.

Metaphor

The idiom is a

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide, or obscure, clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are usually meant to cr ...

for the common

behaviour Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions of Individual, individuals, organisms, systems or Artificial intelligence, artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or or ...

of responding disproportionately to something - usually an adverse circumstance. One who ''makes a mountain out of a molehill'' is said to be greatly exaggerating the severity of the situation. In

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...

, this form of

distortion In signal processing, distortion is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) of a signal. In communications and electronics it means the alteration of the waveform of an information-bearing signal, such as an audio signal ...

is called

magnification Magnification is the process of enlarging the apparent size, not physical size, of something. This enlargement is quantified by a size ratio called optical magnification. When this number is less than one, it refers to a reduction in size, so ...

or overreacting. The phrase itself is so common that a study by psychologists found that with respect to familiarity and image value, it ranks high among the 203 common sayings they tested.Kenneth L. Higbee and Richard J. Millard, ''Visual imagery and familiarity ratings for 203 sayings'', Am. J. Psychiatry, Summer 1983, Vol. 96, No. 2, pp. 211–22; found a
JSTOR website
Retrieved January 28, 2010. Similar idioms include ''Much ado about nothing'' and ''Making a song and dance about nothing''. The meaning finds its opposite in the fable about

the mountain in labour ''The Mountain in Labour'' is one of Aesop's Fables and appears as number 520 in the Perry Index. The story became proverbial in Classical times and was applied to a variety of situations. It refers to speech acts which promise much but deliver li ...

that gives birth to a mouse. In the former too much is made of little; in the latter one is led to expect much, but with too little result. The two appear to converge in

William Caxton William Caxton () was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into Kingdom of England, England in 1476, and as a Printer (publishing), printer to be the first English retailer ...

's translation of the fable (1484), where he makes of the mountain "". In other words, he mimics the meaning of the fable by turning a mountain into a molehill. It was in the context of this bringing together of the two ideas that the English idiom grew.

Origin

The earliest recorded use of the

alliterative Alliteration is the repetition of syllable-initial consonant sounds between nearby words, or of syllable-initial vowels if the syllables in question do not start with a consonant. It is often used as a List of narrative techniques#Style, litera ...

phrase ''making a mountain out of a molehill'' dates from 1548. The word ''

mole Mole (or Molé) may refer to: Animals * Mole (animal) or "true mole" * Golden mole, southern African mammals * Marsupial mole Marsupial moles, the Notoryctidae family, are two species of highly specialized marsupial mammals that are found i ...

'' was less than two hundred years old by then. Previous to that it had been known by its

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

name , which had slowly changed to . A

molehill A molehill (or mole-hill, mole mound) is a conical mound of loose soil raised by small burrowing mammals, including moles, but also similar animals such as mole-rats, and voles. The word is first recorded in the first half of the 15th century. ...

was known as a , a word that continued in dialect use for centuries more. The former name of was then replaced by (meaning earth-thrower), a shortened version of which () began to appear in the later 14th century and the word ''molehill'' in the first half of the 15th century. The idiom is found in

Nicholas Udall Nicholas Udall (or Uvedale Udal, Woodall, or other variations) (1504 – 23 December 1556) was an English playwright, cleric, schoolmaster, the author of '' Ralph Roister Doister'', generally regarded as the first comedy written in the English ...

's translation of ''

The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus vpon the newe testamente ''The First tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the new testament'' or the ''Paraphrase of Erasmus'' is the first volume of a book combining an English translation of the New Testament interleaved with an English translation of Deside ...

'' (1548) in the statement that "The Sophistes of Grece coulde through their copiousness make an Elephant of a flye, and a mountaine of a mollehill." The comparison of the elephant with a fly () is an old Latin proverb that Erasmus recorded in his collection of such phrases, the

Adagia ''Adagia'' (singular ''adagium'') is the title of an annotated collection of Greek language, Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch Humanism, humanist Erasmus, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' repository of p ...

, European variations on which persist. The mountain and molehill seem to have been added by Udall and the phrase has continued in popular use ever since. If the idiom was not coined by Udall himself, the linguistic evidence above suggests that it cannot have been in existence long.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Make A Mountain Out Of A Molehill English-language idioms Metaphors 16th-century neologisms 16th-century quotations Quotations from literature

Metaphor

Origin

See also

References