Listening exercises with “The final straw”
The final straw or the last straw refers to the last in a series of problems or annoyances that finally makes a situation unbearable or causes someone to lose patience and react. We usually use it when someone has been tolerating a series of problems for some time, and then one final event (often something quite small) pushes them over the edge into action or reaction.
e.g. I’d been unhappy at work for months, but when they cancelled my holiday at the last minute, that was the final straw – I handed in my notice the next day.
e.g. The restaurant had got our order wrong twice and made us wait an hour for the bill. When they overcharged us as well, that was the last straw and we asked to speak to the manager.
This idiom comes from the longer expression “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. The image is of a camel being loaded with straw – it can carry a huge amount, but eventually one final piece of straw will be too much, and its back will break. It’s not that this final straw is heavy on its own – it’s the accumulation of everything before it that causes the breaking point. Understanding the literal origin of idioms like this is often a good way to understand (and remember) the meaning.
Many languages have similar idioms with the same meaning but different images – often something like ‘the final drop that caused the glass to overflow’. Does your language have an equivalent expression? What’s the literal origin?
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