To sensationalize or exaggerate in speech to alarm or scare people; to spread alarmist rumors; to deliberately create a panic.
Era:
Ancient
Frequency:
Story:
Once, during the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Gu Kaizhi and Huan Xuan were amusing themselves at Yin Zhongkan's home in Jiankang. They decided to play a game called "dangerous words" (危语), where each person had to describe an extremely perilous situation in a single sentence.
Huan Xuan said: "Cooking millet on the tip of a spear or a sword." This meant trying to prepare food on the sharp, unstable tip of weaponry.
Yin Zhongkan then said: "A hundred-year-old man clinging to a withered branch." This depicted a very old man precariously hanging from a dry, brittle tree branch.
Finally, Gu Kaizhi declared: "A baby lying on a well pulley." A well pulley is easily rolled, and a baby lying on it would be in extreme danger.
Later generations used this act of deliberately saying exaggerated and frightening things to alarm people as the idiom "危言耸听".