fairy tale

fairy tale

1. noun A lie or fabricated account of something (likened to a clearly fictional fantasy story). I know he's telling me fairy tales to avoid admitting his mistakes.
2. adjective Resembling a fantasy story, especially due to being entirely positive or happy or having a happy ending. In this usage, the phrase is usually hyphenated. I really want a fairy-tale wedding, complete with a beautiful gown and a fancy cake. It wasn't some fairy-tale marriage, you know. We had our problems.
See also: fairy, tale
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

fairy tale

and bedtime story
n. a simplistic and condescending explanation for something; a lie. I don’t want to hear a fairy tale, just the facts, ma’am. I’ve already heard your little bedtime story. You’ll have to do better than that!
See also: fairy, tale
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • a little
  • muck-raking
  • bulletproof
  • a few
  • appropriate for
  • make a fist of
  • make a good/bad/etc. fist of (something)
  • welcome to (do something)
  • welcome to do
  • precious little
References in periodicals archive
Mr Right Means An Always Great Relationship Fairy Tale Another unrealistic fairy tale women have about the perfect guy is that with Mr Right there won't be any problems.
"Fairy tales and imagination play a prominent role in our childhood experiences, and this curiosity for magic is carried into adulthood," the Garden's Lindsay Gill said.
Award-winning storyteller Bethan Mascorenhas from Llangollen will be telling fairy tales, singing songs and using puppets to entertain youngsters in Welsh and English until 6pm.
In her third chapter, 'Science and Superstition, Realism and Romance: Fairy Tale and Fantasy in the Adult Shilling Monthly' Sumpter brings new insights to the fascination with fairy tales evident in Macmillan's Magazine and the Cornhill Magazine, two pioneering periodicals of the 1860s usually hailed for their domestic realism rather than their engagements with fantasy.
Literarni pregled: Pravljica v stiski (Literary Overview: The Fairy Tale in Distress).
Bacchilega investigates how, why, and for whom fairy tales have been changed in the twenty-first century--essential questions that must be asked in today's fairytale scholarship.
Fairy Tale Film," explores how childhood has become a consumable product and how children are encouraged to become consumers.
A follow-up to the Great Nursery Rhyme Disaster, this book sees Conway move over to fairy tales to shake things up a bit.
That is, the presence of fairy tale allusions and structures in his work suggests that Hawthorne's view of reality includes the psychological, the imaginative, and the ephemeral as well as the social and the cultural.
As an anthology that lies at the intersection of Creative Writing and Fairy Tale Studies, if not Folklore more generally, Brothers and Beasts grows out of the previous collection, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, after men's voices were pushed out of the original anthology.
TO CELEBRATE the forthcoming launch of J K Rowling's new book The Beedle of the Bard which is a collection of fairy tales, we are challenging you to write your own fairy tale.
But no matter how she is entertained she still cries: "I'm bored!" Using traditional fairy tale tropes of repetition and exaggeration, Mireille Levert presents a new fairy tale reminiscent of the classics: a petulant princess, a search for a prince, and finally the perfect, surprising gift that opens her eyes and heart.
Finding the perfect wedding venue can be the hardest part of planning your big day, and there is a fairy tale location right here on Merseyside you might not be familiar with.