world's smallest violin
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.52 in modern English
29
Scrabble Score
20
Letters
5
Syllables
13
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Ohh, boo-hoo! Let me play a sad song for you on the world's smallest violin."
- "The world's smallest violin playing hearts and flowers for every sweetheart of the Midwest who didn't make it in Hollywood."
- "He stretches out his arm and then rubs his thumb and forefinger together as if he is playing the world's smallest violin for the world's largest whiner. How rude is that?"
- "Even someone upset about something as serious and awful as cancer wasn't safe from my world's smallest violin. Well, you have cancer. That sucks but cancer has been beaten."
- "The world's smallest violin / Really needs an audience / So if I do not find somebody soon (That's right, that's right) / I'll blow up into smithereens"
- "“We are privileged to have this job – but also face some uniquely terrible employment practices. You can’t talk openly about them without feeling it’s like getting out the world’s smallest violin,” sighed one MP."
Etymology
A version of Hearts and Flowers on violin was used in many melodramatic films in the early 1900s. From this and the use of other violin pieces in melodramatic films derive the term hearts and flowers (“extremely sentimental and sweet”), the phrase break out the violins (in a dismissive/sarcastic show of sympathy), and the image of a violin (small, to reflect that the woe complained of is perceived to be small) playing Hearts and Flowers or "the world's saddest song" in response to complaints of woe.