Not Thriving: Storm In A Teacup

A grand total of two intrawiki inbound links, and I can't figure out what the hell the title is supposed to mean.

Horrible title. It's basically "enormous fuss over something that's revealed to be not fuss-worthy"...not sure how that title's supposed to get that across at all.

Tempest In A Teapot is the normal term for "making a big fuss over something that is not fuss-worthy", but that Example as a Thesis fogs up the trope so much that I can't be sure whether the trope is the same thing.

The examples do seem to fit that definition, even if it's currently limited to Sitcoms and TV series, but the description is terrible.

First off, only two wicks. A trope pages should have at least 14. Secondly, no You know that thing where, much less any hats. So why not send it to you know that thing and then, if makes it out, simply cross link it on other pages?

edited 20th Jun '14 1:18:10 PM by IndirectActiveTransport

I was actually shocked it had as many as 11 edits since 2011, even if a number of those were tweaks of earlier edits, especially since some of the people who edited it should have known well enough to take it to TRS. The lack of division by medium, initial Zero Context Example, and only two non-TV examples scream holdover from the early days of the wiki, and I fully expected it to be pretty much untouched since then.

edited 19th Jun '14 8:53:45 PM by MorganWick

Not to mention that one of those two wicks is an index listing, which doesn't really count.

I think sending it back to the YKTTW would be the best option.

So this is about a character freaking out about an event, only to find out that there was some hidden circumstance which made all of his/her worrying pointless from the beginning or even before? Is that right?

I feel like Mountain Out Of A Molehill would be a much more indicative name, as it's a more common colloquialism.

^^ That's basically it, yes.

^ "Mountain out of a molehill" should certainly at least be a redirect. Which one of "Molehill" or "Teapot" is more common is probably a regional thing.

I should point out that "Storm in a Teacup" is also the name of several works, the latest of which is a computer game which has nothing to do with the trope (rather, it is the story of a guy named Storm who flies around in a literal teacup).

For me, Storm in a Teacup is more familiar than Tempest In A Teapot, though Mountain Out Of A Molehill probably slightly more than either.

edited 21st Jun '14 3:42:19 AM by AnotherDuck

Yeah, this definitely needs to go (back) to YKTTW

Re the name that gets used:

• "Mountain out of a molehill" gets 3,340,000 hits on Google. The earliest written occurrence of it from the year 1660: James Howell in a lexicon book containing proverbs from many different languages, and inside the phrase is penned quite simply as: "Making mountains of molehill."
• "Tempest in a teapot" gets 266,000 hits, is noted to be primarily used in American English, and can be definitively dated back to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1825.
• "Storm in a teacup" gets 1,160,000 hits, but that includes hits for the game, and a movie, and a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, rather than just the phrase. This variation is English rather than American. The earliest documented use of the phrase is by Catherine Sinclair, a Scottish novelist and children's writer, in a novel of fashionable society life, Modern Accomplishments, or the march of intellect, in 1838.

There is also Much Ado About Nothing, which is derived from Shakespeare's play of the same name and exploits a homophone ("nothing" <-> "noting").

Methinks we'll need a crowner to pick the definitive name.

There are probably hundreds of other phrases that mean the same thing (The oldest known version is from Cicero, in De Legibus, written around 52BC. The translation of "excitabat fluctus in simpulo" is often given as "He was stirring up billows in a ladle".).

I was looking only at the three that were brought up here to provide some data for which should be the main name and which should be redirects for search purposes.

I see no reason to deliberately use a trope name like Much Ado About Nothing, that we know will cause collisions on a (rather well-known) work.

edited 21st Jun '14 7:11:11 AM by Madrugada

Much Ado About Nothing is also a redirect to a work page with wicks, so it doesn't really work.

So "storm in a teacup" is actually something that people say somewhere in the Anglosphere?

Not sure any of the proposed names fit. Seems like they all mean "worry about something that isn't that important" while the description is "think something is a big problem then find out that it isn't", which isn't quite the same thing.

They all mean "make a fuss about something as though it's important when it isn't." The only difference between that and the current definition is that the definition specifies that they don't know it's unimportant until after the fuss has been made. It's often used as a subtrope of It Seemed Trivial or You Didn't Ask

edited 21st Jun '14 3:28:26 PM by Madrugada

Clock is set.

Clock's up; locking for inactivity.