The story
Long before English had this saying, there was an older one: to make an elephant out of a fly. The scholar Erasmus gathered it, in Latin, into his famous collection of classical proverbs.
In 1548 the English schoolmaster Nicholas Udall translated a work by Erasmus. In it he wrote that the sophists of Greece, with all their fancy talk, could “make an Elephant of a flye, and a mountaine of a mollehill.”
The elephant and the fly were borrowed. The mountain and the molehill seem to have been Udall’s own touch, and the catchy pairing of m-words is the one English kept.
It is a perfect picture. A molehill is a small heap of loose soil pushed up by a mole digging below the lawn. Nothing about it is truly a problem—unless someone decides it is.
The phrase has had a long run since. Over nearly five centuries, the molehill has stayed exactly the same size, and the mountain has only grown.
