add insult to injury
Formsadds insult to injury, adding insult to injury, added insult to injury
- 1To make a bad situation even worse by saying or doing something hurtful.
Like spilling juice on someone and then laughing at their wet shirt.
The store charged me twice, and to add insult to injury, they blamed me for the mix-up.
Losing the match was hard enough, but the other team mocked us, which really added insult to injury.
Note
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Origin
This saying comes from a story by Phaedrus in the first century CE, about a bald man who tries to hit a fly on his head but hits himself instead. The exact English wording appeared in the mid-1700s.