huff and puff

Example: “The landlord huffed and puffed about eviction, but he never followed through.”

Origin: Both halves are onomatopoeic and older than the phrase. To huff was to blow or pant audibly — and, separately, to take offense, which is why an offended person is still in a huff — while to puff was to expel breath in short forceful bursts. Pairing them produced a rhyming compound of the kind English builds readily, and what fixed it permanently was a children's story: the wolf in The Three Little Pigs announces that he will huff and puff and blow the house in, and the tale reached print in the 1840s and was reprinted endlessly thereafter. That association gives the phrase its particular modern flavor, since the wolf's huffing succeeds twice and then conspicuously fails — which is why the expression now usually implies noisy effort that does not accomplish very much.