Add insult to injury Neutral

To make an already difficult, painful, or embarrassing situation even worse by adding a further insult, humiliation, or piece of bad luck.

It describes a situation with two layers of harm: an original setback, the injury, followed by something that mocks or worsens it, the insult.

The idiom is often traced to a fable by the Roman writer Phaedrus, in which a bald man, trying to swat a fly that had bitten his head, slaps himself instead, turning a minor injury into a further self-inflicted humiliation. The English idiom in its current wording is documented from the eighteenth century and became a fixed, widely used expression in both British and American English by the nineteenth century.

The airline lost her luggage, and to add insult to injury, they charged her for the extra baggage fee anyway.

He crashed his brand-new car, and to add insult to injury, the other driver blamed him for the accident.

I failed the exam, and to add insult to injury, my professor read my worst answer out loud to the class.

A: I heard you got laid off.

B: Yes, and to add insult to injury, they made me train my replacement first.