When we use proverbs in a language which is not our mother tongue, we have to be careful and make sure we are using them correctly. There is a proverb in Spanish : ” Fue la gota que colmó el vaso”, which means that a minor action which apparently is not important, may cause a terrible reaction , basically because it has not been the only one. That is, the reaction is the result of the cumulative effect of small actions.
Sometimes pupils want to include this kind of idioms in their compositions and they write things such as: “This was the last drop”, which doesn’t make any sense in English. They translate the expression literally from Spanish into English, without taking into consideration that each language is special and unique. What should we say if we want to convey the above explained meaning? Very easy: ” The straw that broke the camel’s back”.
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