| 翻訳と辞書 |
| Making a mountain out of a molehill ： ウィキペディア英語版 |
Make a mountain out of a molehill
Making a mountain out of a molehill is an idiom 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 for the common behaviour 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.〔(Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus )〕 In cognitive psychology, this form of distortion is called magnification. 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. 211-222; found at (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 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's translation of the fable (1484), where he makes of the mountain ''a hylle whiche beganne to tremble and shake by cause of the molle whiche delved it''. 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.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
■ウィキペディアで「Make a mountain out of a molehill」の詳細全文を読む
スポンサード リンク
| 翻訳と辞書 : 翻訳のためのインターネットリソース |
Copyright(C) kotoba.ne.jp 1997-2016. All Rights Reserved.
|
|