A: My wife hasn’t slept for several nights. She took the baby’s temperatures every other hour since he showed symptoms of a cold. B: You guys need to relax. New parents tend to push the panic button over every little sniffle their first baby gets. You learn to chill out when you have more kids. Note: This idiom means “to overreact to a supposed emergency.” It originated during World War II, when B-17 and B-24 bombers had a bell-warning system so that the crew could bail out when the plane was badly hit. Occasionally this button would be pushed by mistake and the crew would bail out unnecessarily, even though the plane was virtually undamaged. By extension, the term came to mean “acting in needless haste.” People also say “to press the panic button.” |