"Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Fire"

"Out of the frying pan into the fire" - A piece of food being fried in a pan is hot enough, but falling out of the frying pan and into the fire is even worse. Going from a bad situation to an even worse one. The Italian author Laurentius Abstemius wrote a collection of 100 fables, the Hecatomythium, during the 1490s. This included some based on popular idioms and proverbs of the day. Abstemius' fable 20, concerns some fish thrown live into a frying pan of boiling fat. One of them urges its fellows to save their lives by jumping out, but when they do so they fall into the burning coals and curse its bad advice. The fabulist concludes: 'This fable warns us that when we are avoiding present dangers, we should not fall into even worse peril. The tale was included in Latin collections of Aesop's fables from the following century onwards but the first person to adapt it into English was Roger L'Estrange in 1692. "The same expression or one closely allied to it is common to many languages; in the second century the Greek equivalent was 'out of the smoke into the flame'; the Italian and Portuguese, 'to fall from the frying pan into the coals'; the Gaelic, 'out of the cauldron into the fire,' and the French, from which the English may be a translation,' to leap from the frying pan into the fire ('tomber de la poéle dans le feu')'