Meaning
Behave inconsistently by alternating between enthusiasm and reluctance, approval and disapproval, or other opposite attitudes, leaving your true position difficult to judge.
Origin
The image is preserved in the traditional Aesopic fable 'The Satyr and the Traveller': a traveller blows on his hands to warm them and on his food to cool it, leading the satyr to distrust someone who blows hot and cold with the same mouth. The fable explains the metaphor, but it does not date the English wording to the supposed lifetime of Aesop. William Chillingworth used the expression figuratively in The Religion of Protestants in 1638, providing firm early English evidence. 'Run hot and cold' is a recorded equivalent, but the sources do not establish that its wording followed the same route from the fable.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Blow both hot and cold
- Blow hot and cold with the same breath
- Run hot and cold
Usage Examples
- The board has blown hot and cold on the merger, praising its savings one week and questioning it the next.
- His publisher kept blowing hot and cold, so Lena did not know whether the manuscript would be accepted.
- Voters may lose confidence when a minister blows hot and cold on the same policy.