A Drop in the Bucket

Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing.
And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering.
All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.

-- Isaiah 40: 15-17 (KJV)

Here the author of Second Isaiah reminds the exiled Jews of the mysterious wisdom and awesome power of the Lord. Hostile nations are to him "as a drop of a bucket," a mere trifle.

Yes, "a drop of a bucket" is the original phrase, coined by the translator Wyclif in the fourteenth century. Though we've changed one word, the meaning is essentially the same: a drop is inconsequential, whether it's added to, subtracted from, or left in the bucket. What matters more is how big a bucket you're talking about -- which is why legislators, for example, can speak of huge sums of money as merely "a drop in the bucket" of a mind-boggling budget.

"Drop of" was the standard phrasing for centuries. But perhaps under the influence of such later expressions as "a drop of water in the ocean" (from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, 1844) and "a drop in the sea" (coined nine years later), "drop of" quietly gave way to "drop in." The latter and now familiar version has been traced to a letter of Hart Crane's, written in 1921, in which the poet cites "Sara Teasdale, Marguerite Wilkinson, Lady Speyer, etc." as "a few drops in the bucket of feminine lushness."

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!