cry wolf

From the fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf, where a little boy amuses himself by crying "wolf" to see the panic he causes in the community, but is consequently ignored when he tries to alert them to a real wolf.

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cry wolf (third-person singular simple present cries wolf, present participle crying wolf, simple past and past participle cried wolf)

1. (idiomatic) To raise a false alarm; to constantly warn others about an imagined threat, thereby failing to get assistance when a real threat appears.

   The politicians would cry wolf at the slightest provocation so when the real threat appeared no one believed them.

   • 1907, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, chapter II, in The War in the Air: […], London: George Bell and Sons, published 1908, OCLC 472087563:

     The newspaper placards that had cried "wolf!" so often, cried "wolf!" now in vain.

   • 1921 [1919], H. L. Mencken, chapter 5, in The American Language, 2nd edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, →ISBN, OCLC 801036993, page 36:

     […] and the critical sense of the professors counts for little, for they cry wolf too often […]

   • 1983, Ronald Reagan, Presidential Radio Address - 15 October, 1983

     […] those who created the worst economic mess in postwar history should be the last people crying wolf 1,000 days into this administration […]

   • 2021 July 17, Somini Sengupta, quoting Ulka Kelkar, “‘No One Is Safe’: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World”, in The New York Times‎, ISSN 0362-4331:

     These intensifying disasters now striking richer countries, she said, show that developing countries seeking the world’s help to fight climate change “have not been crying wolf.”

• Chicken Little