Chipper
What Does It Mean If You Say "This Is The Last Straw!"?
The full proverb is "The last straw breaks the camel's back," although we seldom use this. The idea is that if you pile on enough small annoyances or problems, eventually they will have the same effect as one huge problem, and cause you to lose control or break down. It's a bit like the idea of the "water torture" in which a person had to sit under a single drop of water, which would eventually wear through the skull or drive them mad.
You sometimes hear a person shout, "This is the last straw!" when some quite trivial thing goes wrong, such as the car refusing to start. This means that the person has already had to deal with a lot of problems that day, and cannot bear even one thing more.
There are versions of this saying in many languages; in German, for instance, there is a saying "The barrel is full," which is closer to the "water torture" idea – one more drop, and everything will spill over.
You sometimes hear a person shout, "This is the last straw!" when some quite trivial thing goes wrong, such as the car refusing to start. This means that the person has already had to deal with a lot of problems that day, and cannot bear even one thing more.
There are versions of this saying in many languages; in German, for instance, there is a saying "The barrel is full," which is closer to the "water torture" idea – one more drop, and everything will spill over.