Camel

Yesterday, I encountered this expression “the camel straw” (which itself is not a common idiom). It turns out to come from a more common phrase “straw that breaks/broke the camel’s back”, meaning “the minor action in a series of bad actions that causes a large reaction (because of the cumulative effect)”. It’s easy to imagine the situation where you feel as if you could put pieces of straw on a camel’s back endlessly, but of course at some point they become heavy enough to break the hump. The simpler phrase “the final/last straw” has a similar meaning.

Here’s one more idiom with camel: “a camel’s nose (under the tent)” This idiom means “a small seemingly innocuous decision that will lead to much larger consequences”. It comes from the story about a man in a tent who only allowed a camel to put its nose inside the tent and ended up having a whole camel in his tent.

References

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_that_broke_the_camel%27s_back
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose