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Phrase: Cry wolf
If you want to expand your vocabulary repertoire, follow the news.
You can learn the English language, or any language for that matter, from the newspaper.
Recent European events have provided us with the opportunity to look at the idiom cry wolf.
When someone cries wolf, they raise a false alarm.
Do that a few times, and people will not believe you even when telling the truth.
It comes from an Aesop’s fable titled ‘The Boy Who Cried, Wolf.’
In the fable, a young boy is tending a flock of sheep in the mountains.
As you can imagine, watching sheep is not much fun, and the boy becomes bored.
He decides to have some fun by saying a wolf was attacking the flock.
All the villagers came out to chase the wolf away but quickly realized there was no wolf and the boy was only having some fun at their expense.
He cried wolf a few times.
Then, one day, a wolf did attack the sheep.
When he screamed for help, no one came to help him because he had cried wolf too many times.
The wolf ate the sheep and the boy too.
In Ukraine, everyone thought the United States was crying wolf when they warned a Russian invasion was imminent.
It’s not that the United States had lied before, but that no one wanted to admit they could see the danger before their eyes.
The US was right, and now the Russian bear (Russia is often depicted as a bear) is attacking Ukraine.
Take advantage of the news to improve your English vocabulary, and never cry wolf.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 77.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.