The Boy Who Cried Wolf

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 210 in the Perry Index. From it is derived the English idiom "to cry wolf", defined as "to give a false alarm" in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and glossed by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are disbelieved. Fable The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks villagers into believing a wolf is attacking his flock. When a real wolf appears and the boy cries for help, the villagers dismiss it as another false alarm, allowing the wolf to devour the sheep. In a later English-language poetic version of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy. This happens in John Hookham Frere's Fables for Five Years Old (1830), in William Ellery Leonard's Aesop & Hyssop (1912), and in Louis Untermeyer's 1965 poem. The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is "this...