a storm in a teacup

Example: “The row over the office thermostat was a storm in a teacup.”

Origin: The joke is much older than the teacup. Cicero, writing in the first century BC, described someone stirring up waves in a ladle, and comparable phrases turn up in Greek — the pattern of naming a violent natural event and then confining it to an absurdly small domestic vessel is a very old way of mocking disproportion. English fitted it to tea: "storm in a teacup" is attested from the early 1800s, once tea was ordinary enough that a teacup was the obvious smallest vessel to hand. American English took the same idea to a slightly different piece of the tea service and says "tempest in a teapot," and both forms carry the identical implication — that the fury is genuine but the container is too small for any of it to matter.