I've heard pecked to death by swans...

I'd go for the nibbling ducks instead. swans can be mean. pretty though.

I heard it from Betsy on Table Talk. And I'm guessing cause ducks take small bites and wouldn't savage you like a bear might(Ok, Stephen, you can look now)

I've heard it in several non-Buffista/TT contexts....

I'm pretty sure I heard it before finding b.org. But then, there are expressions that are confined to either a region or other groups. (Once, in college, I used the phrase "not enough room to swing a cat" and the person I was speaking to not only had never heard it, but she ran off to write it down to repeat to ... whoever.)

I'm lecturing tonight at 8:20 p.m. The professor coordinating this piece of the evening students' orientation just told me what classroom we'll be in, and then mentioned that she forgot to ask the AV people to unlock the computer. I raced to catch someone before they all left for the day and found out we've been scheduled in the room where the projector is broken.

So long as we're talking about ducks and their nibbly ways.

I heard it from Betsy on Table Talk. And I'm guessing cause ducks take small bites and wouldn't savage you like a bear might(Ok, Stephen, you can look now)

Betsy rocks. (ETA: Whether or not it originated with her.) I use that expression all the time and love it to pieces. And yeah, I see it as every nibble being some little annoyance that isn't a big deal by itself, but the cumulative effect is really not fun.

I googled the exact phrase and got 12,900 matches: [link]

One also had the phrase "death by a thousand cuts" which is similar but sounds a little more gory....

I know I've used it for 20 years, because we used it all the time at a job I had that pretty much consisted of being duck food.

LexisNexis has an instance of it in the Washington Post back in 1979, and that article uses it as if it's nothing new.

Huh. Interesting. I'm gonna have to tell her that she's way behind the times.