huff and puff

Idioms and Phrases

Make noisy, empty threats; bluster. For example, You can huff and puff about storm warnings all you like, but we'll believe it when we see it . This expression uses two words of 16th-century origin, huff , meaning “to emit puffs of breath in anger,” and puff , meaning “to blow in short gusts,” and figuratively, “to inflate” or “make conceited.” They were combined in the familiar nursery tale, “The Three Little Pigs,” where the wicked wolf warns, “I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down”; rhyme has helped these idioms survive.

Example Sentences

In the ad, Berlant suggests that the woman on the mountain needn't huff and puff on that ragged path upwards — an act meant to symbolize eating a plant-based diet to save the planet.

From Salon

“The Canadian government placed a very big bet that this was all a bluff from the tech companies and they could not live without Canadian news and they would huff and puff but would ultimately cave,” said Michael Geist, the Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa.

From Los Angeles Times

"The message is quite simple: if you do a lot of "huff and puff" exercise, then your risk of dying early or developing diseases in the future is reduced. If you avoid exercise your health may suffer."

From Science Daily

And for all the huff and puff, a panicked and pedestrian Wales were desperately short of quality and creativity in the final third, despite the array of attacking options.

From BBC

If he couldn't get a win he'd have reluctantly taken a draw, but all he got was huff and puff.

From BBC

Related Words

• gasp
• heave
• huff
• smoke
• suck
• wheeze