The bane of one’s life is whatever causes you constant trouble or unhappiness. ‘Bane’ began in Old English as a word for a murderer, passed through a long stretch meaning poison, and only softened into everyday annoyance in the 1570s. The earliest example of ‘the bane of his life’ in print that has been found is from 1592.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘The bane of one’s life’?
We don’t often use the word ‘bane’ any longer and when we do it is likely to be as part of ‘the bane of my/his/her life’. This is usually uttered as a complaint against a not very serious threat, for example, a gardener might complain “those slugs are the bane of my life”. Baneful threats weren’t always so casual. ‘Bane’ is a very ancient word, recorded in the Old English Chronicles as early as circa 800, meaning ‘murderer’. The bane of one’s life in those days was a very real threat to one’s existence.
The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the word to Old English bana, glossed ‘killer, slayer, murderer, a worker of death’, a term applied to a person, an animal or an object, and used as a name for the devil as well. The same dictionary dates the milder sense, ‘that which causes ruin or woe’, to the 1570s. The timing matters: the word had only just acquired its lighter meaning when the full expression turned up in print about twenty years later. The modern bane is nearer to a thorn in the flesh than to anything lethal.
Over time, the term ‘bane’ came to mean ‘that which causes death’ and specifically, poison. This is still with us in the names of various poisonous plants, for example Henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), Wolfsbane (Aconitum) and the unpleasant sounding Ratsbane, which is another name for rat poison that is, arsenic.
Those plant names can be dated. Henbane is on record from the middle of the 13th century, and John of Trevisa’s late 14th-century translation of Bartholomew Glanville spells out the reasoning: “Iusquiamus, henne bane, is mannes bane.” Ratsbane appears in the 1520s, defined by the Online Etymology Dictionary as “rat poison, arsenic”. Shakespeare still had the poison in view when he wrote Measure for Measure, printed in the First Folio of 1623, where Claudio says that our appetites run to their own destruction “like rats that ravin down their proper bane”.
The earliest recorded use that I can find of ‘the bane of someone’s life’ comes from a date at which we can assume he really meant it - Gabriel Harvey’s Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets, 1592:
“He that like a Lacedemonian, or Romane, accounteth Infamy worse than death, would be loath to emprove his courage, or to employ his patience, in digestinge the pestilent bane of his life.”
Harvey was not writing about slugs. The lines stand in the epistle at the front of the book, whose full title marks it out as a quarrel ‘especially touching Robert Greene’, and the bane he has in mind is defamation: a man who counts infamy worse than death, he argues, would be loath to spend his patience swallowing it. The reprint of the 1592 text spells it ‘then death’ and ‘emproue’. That is the old, heavy sense of the word still in serious use in the decade the milder one was settling in.
Two variants are worth pinning down. ‘Bain of my life’ is a misspelling and nothing more; the word is ‘bane’, from Old English bana, and ‘bain’ has no part in it. ‘The bane of my existence’ is the same idiom in different clothes. The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘the bane of something’ as “a cause of continuous trouble or unhappiness” and lists ‘the bane of someone’s life’ in its English entry, while its American Dictionary entry illustrates the word with “the bane of my existence these days”. That split is a fair guide to where each form is commoner, and the two mean exactly the same thing.