The last straw that broke the camel's back

Example: “He had put up with the late nights for months, but missing his daughter's recital was the last straw that broke the camel's back.”

Origin: The English proverb's documented ancestor uses a different animal and a lighter object: Archbishop John Bramhall wrote in 1655 of the last feather that breaks the horse's back, and variants with feathers, horses, and overloaded carts circulated through the 1700s. The camel arrives in the 1800s, and Charles Dickens fixed the modern image in Dombey and Son in 1848, writing of the last straw breaking the laden camel's back. The point of the proverb is cumulative rather than dramatic: no single straw could injure anything, and the one that finally does the damage is not special in itself — it simply happens to be the one added after the load had already reached the limit, which is exactly why the trivial final provocation gets the blame for a collapse that everything before it had prepared. The phrase is sometimes said to come from an Arabic fable, but no such source has been identified, and the claim appears to stem from confusion with the separate tale of the camel that gets its nose into the tent.