Waiting for the other shoe to drop

This has to be my favourite jargon phrase ever.

What the hell does it mean?

I mean, I know what it means. It means something bad yet salvageable has happened, but the likkelihood of an escalation is immense, so everyone is just hanging around not making any decisions about anything...

... because they are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Before I research this, I am going to bet that it has something to do with hanging.


Time passes, while Queenie does the Google thing...

NOPE!! Queenie is wrong. People who are hanged don't have to endure their shoes falling off one by one, which is the visual image she had in her head for this phrase. It apparently has its roots in a vaudeville sketch. From Worldwide Words:

Its source would seem to be the following story. A man comes in late at night to a lodging house, rather the worse for wear. He sits on his bed, drags one shoe off and drops it on the floor. Guiltily remembering everyone around him trying to sleep, he takes the other one off much more carefully and quietly puts in on the floor. He then finishes undressing and gets into bed. Just as he is drifting off to sleep, a shout comes from the man in the room below: “Well, drop the other one then! I can’t sleep, waiting for you to drop the other shoe!”. This may come from music hall or vaudeville, though it would seem that nobody has been able to tie it down more precisely.

Anyways, that's what we're doing in our house, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The fact that we live under the top flat means that that happens at least twice a day, but that's not the shoe I'm talking about.

You learn something every time you log on here, don't you.