blow hot and cold, to

To vacillate, to be indecisive. The expression comes from Aesop’s fable about a satyr and a traveler eating together on a cold day. The traveler blew on his hands to warm them and on his soup to cool it. Observing this, the satyr threw him out because he blew hot and cold with the same breath. The term then came to mean hypocrisy (“These men can blow hot and cold out of the same mouth to serve severall purposes,” wrote William Chillingworth about the Protestant religion in 1638). However, it also was used to describe simple indecision (“It is said of old, soon hot, soon cold, and so is a woman,” in Thomas Percy’s 1765 collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry).