Adagia

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466 –1536), known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and a theologian.
Adagia (adagium is the singular form and adagia is the plural) is an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' collection of proverbs is "one of the most monumental ... ever assembled".
Among these in English are:

• Make haste slowly
• One step at a time
• To be in the same boat
• To lead one by the nose
• A rare bird
• Even a child can see it
• To have one foot in Charon's boat (To have one foot in the grave)
• To walk on tiptoe
• One to one
• Out of tune
• A point in time
• I gave as bad as I got (I gave as good as I got)
• To call a spade a spade
• Hatched from the same egg
• Up to both ears (Up to his eyeballs)
• As though in a mirror
• Think before you start
• What's done cannot be undone
• Many parasangs ahead (Miles ahead)
• We cannot all do everything
• Many hands make light work
• A living corpse
• Where there's life, there's hope
• To cut to the quick
• Time reveals all things
• Golden handcuffs
• Crocodile tears
• To show the middle finger
• You have touched the issue with a needle-point (To have nailed it)
• To walk the tightrope
• Time tempers grief (Time heals all wounds)
• With a fair wind
• To dangle the bait
• To swallow the hook
• The bowels of the earth
• From heaven to earth
• The dog is worthy of his dinner
• To weigh anchor
• To grind one's teeth
• Nowhere near the mark
• Complete the circle
• In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
• A cough for a fart
• No sooner said than done
• Neither with bad things nor without them (Women: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em)
• Between a stone and a shrine (Between a rock and a hard place)
• Like teaching an old man a new language (Can't teach an old dog new tricks)
• A necessary evil
• There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip
• To squeeze water out of a stone
• To leave no stone unturned
• Let the cobbler stick to his last (Stick to your knitting)
• God helps those who help themselves
• The grass is greener over the fence
• The cart before the horse
• Dog in the manger
• One swallow doesn't make a summer
• His heart was in his boots
• To sleep on it
• To break the ice
• Ship-shape
• To die of laughing
• To have an iron in the fire
• To look a gift horse in the mouth
• Neither fish nor flesh
• Like father, like son
• Not worth a snap of the fingers
• He blows his own trumpet
• To show one's heels


Making a mountain out of a molehill is an idiom referring to over-reactive, histrionic behaviour where a person makes too much of a minor issue. It seems to have come into existence in the 16th century. The earliest recorded use of this alliterative phrase is in 1548.

The word for the animal involved was less than two hundred years old by then. Previous to that the mole had been known by its Old English name wand, which had slowly changed to 'want'. A molehill was known as a 'wantitump', a word that continued in dialect use for centuries more. The old name of want was then replaced by mold(e)warp (meaning earth-thrower), a shortened version of which (molle) began to appear in the later 14th century and the word molehill in the first half of the 15th century.
The idiom, used by Nicholas Udall's translation of The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus vpon the newe testamente (1548), appeared in the statement that "The Sophistes of Grece coulde through their copiousness make an Elephant of a flye, and a mountaine of a mollehill."
The comparison of the elephant with a fly (elephantem ex musca facere) is an old Latin proverb that Erasmus himself had recorded in his collection of such phrases, the Adagia; variations on it still continue in use throughout Europe. The mountain and molehill seem to have been added by Udall and the phrase has continued in popular use ever since. If the idiom was not coined by Udall himself, the linguistic evidence above suggests that it cannot have been in existence long.
Nicholas Udall (1504 –1556) was an English playwright, cleric, pederast and schoolmaster, the author of Ralph Roister Doister, generally regarded as the first comedy written in the English language.

Flesch–Kincaid: 17.9