Talk:wait for the ball to drop

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wait for the ball to drop

To expect that something is going to go wrong.

AFAICT, there are three main uses: sports, viscosity testing, and New Year's Eve in a big city like New York. I found no evidence for the definition in the entry. DCDuring TALK * Holiday Greetings! 23:39, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like how I use wait for the other shoe to drop. google books:"just waiting for the ball to drop" pulls up four hits, and while it's hard to be sure, two seem to be using it this way (though one of those is positively riddled with incompetent English — stuff like “cut threw the chase”, which appears to result from a blend of “cut to the chase” and “cut through the [any of various terms for excrement]”, plus a misspelling of through as threw). The other two seem to be using it as a more general “to wait for something to actually happen” or “to be in a state of anticipation”. —Ruakh_TALK 01:48, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

The mistake-ridden one would be a funny one to have, but the others make more sense. The waiting-for-something-to-happen sense seems more likely to include any possible New Year's Eve allusions that might be lurking and is more general than the one-shoe-then-the-other sense. I has on such a roll through highly questionable entries among Category:English verbs (the subset now also in Category:English predicates) that I lost sympathy with the marginal ones. DCDuring TALK * Holiday Greetings! 02:02, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Fine by me. :-)   —Ruakh_TALK 02:45, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

I've replaced the def with one like you suggest, and removed the tag. Please take a look. —Ruakh_TALK 01:59, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

It really deserves a "rare" tag in this sense too. Almost all the usage is literal in either a sports or New Years context. DCDuring TALK 03:00, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Striking. I've added the "rare" tag. —Ruakh_TALK 23:10, 11 July 2010 (UTC)