Tempest in a teapot (American English), or also phrased as storm in a teacup (British English), or tempest in a teacup, is an idiom meaning a small event that has been exaggerated out of proportion. There are also lesser known or earlier variants, such as storm in a cream bowl, tempest in a glass of water, storm in a wash-hand basin, [1] and storm in a glass of water.
Cicero, in the first century BC, in his De Legibus , used a similar phrase in Latin, possibly the precursor to the modern expressions, Excitabat enim fluctus in simpulo ut dicitur Gratidius, translated: "For Gratidius raised a tempest in a ladle, as the saying is". [2] Then in the early third century AD, Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophistae , has Dorion ridiculing the description of a tempest in the Nautilus of Timotheus by saying that he had seen a more formidable storm in a boiling saucepan. [3] The phrase also appeared in its French form une tempête dans un verre d'eau ('a tempest in a glass of water'), to refer to the popular uprising in the Republic of Geneva near the end of the eighteenth century. [4]
One of the earliest occurrences in print of the modern version is in 1815, where Britain's Lord Chancellor Thurlow, sometime during his tenure of 1783–1792, is quoted as referring to a popular uprising on the Isle of Man as a "tempest in a teapot". [5] Also Lord North, Prime Minister of Great Britain, is credited for popularizing this phrase as characterizing the outbreak of American colonists against the tax on tea. [6] This sentiment was then satirized in Carl Guttenberg's 1778 engraving of the Tea-Tax Tempest (shown above right), where Father Time flashes a magic lantern picture of an exploding teapot to America on the left and Britannia on the right, with British and American forces advancing towards the teapot. Just a little later, in 1825, in the Scottish journal Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine , a critical review of poets Hogg and Campbell also included the phrase "tempest in a teapot". [7]
The first recorded instance of the British English version, "storm in teacup", occurs in Catherine Sinclair's Modern Accomplishments in 1838. [8] [9] There are several instances though of earlier British use of the similar phrase "storm in a wash-hand basin". [10]
A similar phrase exists in numerous other languages:
storm in a teacup.