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To: nickcarraway

I say not a wolf.


32 posted on 02/25/2017 3:25:21 PM PST by fruser1
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To: fruser1

When one is said to cry wolf it is an expression that means to “raise a false alarm”, derived from the fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_Wolf

The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking wolves are attacking his flock. When one actually does appear and the boy again calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm and the sheep are eaten by the wolf. In later English-language poetic versions of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy. This happens in Fables for five year olds (1830) by John Hookham Frere,[4] in William Ellery Leonard’s Aesop & Hyssop (1912),[5] and in his interpretation of Aesop’s Fables (1965) by Louis Untermeyer.[6]

The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is, “this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them”. It echoes a statement attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laërtius in his The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, where the sage was asked what those who tell lies gain by it and he answered “that when they speak truth they are not believed”.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf


35 posted on 02/25/2017 3:32:40 PM PST by ETL (Trump admin apparently playing "good cop, bad cop" with thug Putin (see my FR Home page))
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