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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 calling out "Wolf!" Nearby villagers who came to his rescue 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.
In Popular Culture
In the TV series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a Cardassian proposed a different point of view: that the true moral of the story is not "Do not tell lies" but "Do not tell the same lie twice."
See also
References
- ^ 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
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