Hence, “tempest in a teapot” refers to a situation where something has been exaggerated out of proportion.
“Tempest in a teapot”, by the way, is American. The British call the same thing a “storm in a teapot” or more frequently still a “storm in a teacup” and they’ve been using these expressions for 300 years, obviously ever since the day when they first began to drink the leaves. The American expression on the other hand was “first recorded in 1854” (YourDictionary.com), and changing “storm” to “tempest” presumably made Americans sound more learned.
Shakespeare, of course – and you can’t sound more learned than this man, come to that – would’ve said:
Much ado about nothing.
Alright, enough said. Here are media examples:
1. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expressing her personal opinion when she criticized Canada’s maternal health initiative, not the policy of the Obama administration, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Sunday.
“Mrs. Clinton expressed not her government's position; she expressed her personal point of view...her personal opinion,” Cannon told CTV’s Question Period.
But in the wake of Clinton's criticism of the Canadian initiative, a key foreign policy program for the Conservative government going into this summer’s G8 summit, Cannon acknowledged that the Canadian plan may have to be amended.
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