What does it mean if someone says "the frog is boiling"?
I was in my Philosophy class the other day in college and I am not quite able to understand the boiling frog analogy since the professor only briefly mentioned it about how it means some toxic things go unrecognized.
Answers ( 1 )
The basis of this idiom comes from a fable that says that if you put a frog in a pot of cold or tepid water, it'll stay where it is -- and if you start to heat the water slowly, it'll remain where it is until the water is boiling and the frog dies. As long as the change is gradual, the frog doesn't react by jumping out of the pot.
(This is a fable, not reality -- if you actually try this, the frog totally jumps out.)
The fable isn't about frogs and boiling water, of course; it's about humans and they way they react to increasingly bad situations. If a situation gets slowly worse and worse and worse, the inertia of doing nothing at all is stronger than what's need to rectify whatever the situation is. If applied to politics, you can imagine a scenario where a national government slowly becomes more and more oppressive over the years -- but because the change is very gradual, the people never revolt.
So what does "the frog is boiling" mean? It means that the person or people who are represented by the frog in the fable have passed the point where they can "jump out of the pot" -- through inaction, they have allowed things to become so bad that now they cannot fix the problem. They've been boiled to death.