Storm in a teacup Informal

Great excitement, outrage, or concern over a matter that is, in reality, quite trivial or unimportant.

It’s used dismissively, suggesting that the fuss is disproportionate to whatever actually happened.

The underlying joke — comparing an overblown fuss to a storm raised in an absurdly small container — is remarkably old and well documented. Cicero, in his first-century BC work “De Legibus,” writes that a man named Gratidius “raised a tempest in a ladle, as the saying is” (“excitabat enim fluctus in simpulo ut dicitur Gratidius”), explicitly noting with “ut dicitur” that he was quoting an already-existing popular saying rather than inventing it himself. A few centuries later, the Greek writer Athenaeus recorded a similar joke about someone claiming to have seen “a more formidable storm in a boiling saucepan.” The phrase resurfaced in French in the late eighteenth century as “une tempête dans un verre d’eau,” applied to a popular uprising in Geneva, and reached English by 1815, when Lord Chancellor Thurlow reportedly used “tempest in a teapot” to describe a minor uprising on the Isle of Man; the specific British phrasing “storm in a teacup” is first documented in Catherine Sinclair’s 1838 novel “Modern Accomplishments.”

The whole office argument turned out to be a storm in a teacup.

Don’t worry about the review, it’s just a storm in a teacup.

The media made it sound huge, but it was really a storm in a teacup.

A: Everyone’s panicking about the schedule change. B: It’s a storm in a teacup, honestly.