Thanks for the update and snippets, Wolfgang.

As for Teribus and Áine, you're both a bit right, though Áine'd be righter had Teribus written teapot instead of teacup. Google reports 2,210 pages containing "tempest in a teacup" (Áine's idiom) versus 7,600 containing "storm in a teacup" (Teribus's). However, in one of those on-the-other-hands that make linguistics such a charmingly inexact science, especially when applied to one's mother tongue, it also indexes 9,150 instances of "tempest in a teapot", my own default phrase, versus a mere 84 cases of "storm in a teapot", at least half of them apparently from non-native writers of English.

Haruo