Englishbig fish in a small pond
Meaning: A person who is considered important primarily because the place or setting is small.
Example: “At his small-town firm he was a big fish in a small pond, but in New York nobody knew his name.”
Origin: "Big fish" had already meant an important or influential person since the early 1800s; adding the pond is what turns a compliment into a backhanded one. The full phrase surfaces in print by 1881, in the Galveston Daily News, and the Oxford English Dictionary separately records an 1883 variant in the American magazine Life, where a boastful college student called himself "the big frog in a small puddle." Frog-and-puddle and fish-and-pond ran side by side for a while before fish won out — the point either way being that stature only looks impressive because the container it's measured against is small.
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