The Boy Who Cried Wolf
The Boy Who Cried Wolf, also known as The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf, is a fable attributed to Aesop (210 in Perry's numbering system.[1]) The protagonist of the fable is a bored shepherd boy who entertained himself by tricking nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock of sheep. When they came to his rescue, they found that the alarms were false and that they had wasted their time. When the boy was actually confronted by a wolf, the villagers did not believe his cries for help and the wolf ate the flock (and in some versions the boy). The moral is stated at the end of the fable as:
Even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed. The liar will lie once, twice, and then perish when he tells the truth.
In reference to this tale, the phrase to "cry wolf" has long been a common idiom in English, described in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,[2] and modern English dictionaries.[3][4] The phrase "boy who cried wolf" has also become somewhat of a figure of speech, meaning that one is calling for help when he or she does not really need it. Also in common English there goes the saying: "Never cry wolf" to say that one never should lie, as in the above phrases.
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[edit] Alternative moral
The rather less conventional moral "do not tell the same lie twice" has been drawn from the tale at least twice: first by the writers of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (who place the words in the mouth of Elim Garak), and second by Ricky Gervais (who made the observation on his Politics stand-up comedy tour).[citation needed]
[edit] See also
- Aesop's Fables
- False alarm
- The Girl Who Cried Monster
- King You of Zhou's folly fooled the nobles repeatedly so they would not rescue him in a real danger
- Peter and the Wolf
- Marge Gets a Job - an episode of the Simpsons, where Bart repeatedly invents fake excuses for writing a school test, until he is literally chased by a wolf while writing the test and the teacher does not believe him
- Dixie Carter-Salinas who repeatedly promises surprises & change at TNA and never delivers
[edit] References
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Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- ^ Ben Edwin Perry (1965). Babrius and Phaedrus. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 462, no. 210. ISBN 0-674-99480-9.
- ^ E. Cobham Brewer 1810–1897. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898 - Wolf at bartleby.com, accessed 19 September 2007
- ^ Compact Oxford English Dictionary - wolf, at askoxford.com. OUP, June, 2005, accessed 19 September 2007
- ^ Merriam Webster Online dictionary - Definition of cry from the Merriam-Webster website, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, July, 2003, accessed 19 September 2007
[edit] External links
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Look up cry wolf in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
- The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf', translated by Laura Gibbs
- Boy Who Cried Wolf , exact fable version
