Etymology/Q/Where does the phrase "the bane of my existence" come from?
Where does the phrase "the bane of my existence" come from?
- Short answer: bane is an Old English word for "killer"; the phrase is that word stretched from a literal slayer to a chronic annoyance. The first documented use of the full idiom is not settled.
- Old English
bana meant "killer, slayer, murderer, a worker of death", whether a person, an animal or a thing. It descends from Proto-Germanic *banon, and is cognate with Old Norse bani ("death") and Gothic banja ("stroke, wound"). (Etymonline) - Poison sense — "bane" also came to mean deadly poison, which survives in plant names like wolfsbane and henbane. (Wiktionary, Today I Found Out)
- Softening to "ruin" — by the 1570s "bane" meant "that which causes woe or ruin", no longer requiring a death. (Etymonline)
- "Of my existence" — an intensifier that makes the annoyance the ruin of one's whole life, said with humor. Saying "the bane of my existence" about a printer is a mock-tragic use of a word that once named a murderer.
- Related: baneful ("harmful") comes from the same root. (Etymonline)
- Open: the sources above trace the word, not the phrase. A dated first citation for "bane of my existence" would need the Oxford English Dictionary or a corpus search.