Why We Say “Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Carmen calling from San Diego.

Hi, Carmen.

We’re neighbors practically.

We’re in San Diego as well.

This is where we do the show.

Awesome.

I had a question about the phrase waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was talking to a friend a couple weeks ago, and he just entered a new romantic relationship, and he said it was going really well, but he couldn’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop. And I was thinking, like, where does that phrase come from? What did he mean by that? What did you take from that? Was he suspicious?

Yeah, I think that he meant, like, it was going really well, but he expected something to go wrong.

Oh, he didn’t have a lot of faith that it was going to turn out in his favor.

Well, this phrase, waiting for the other shoe to drop, has been around for at least 100 years in English. And it seems to go back to a story that was circulating in the United States about a guy who comes home to a boarding house after a very late night out. Maybe he’s been drinking or something. And he comes in and he’s getting ready to go to bed and he takes off one shoe and he just lets it drop to the floor, you know, with a thud. And then he realizes, oh, you know, I better be quiet. And so he quietly tiptoes to the bed and takes off the other shoe and gets in bed and is about to go to sleep. And then somebody downstairs, as he’s drifting off to sleep, yells up, well, drop the other shoe then. I can’t sleep. Waiting for you to drop the other shoe. It may have come from vaudeville or some kind of joke.

Yeah, there’s some variations on that. Some people think it has something to do with Mark Twain. For some reason, it gets attached to his names or that there’s somebody who intentionally withholds the second shoe to make their neighbor who’s already nervous and kind of a frightful person kind of go nuts.

Right. It’s kind of like going dun-dun-da-dun-dun-dun. And then by the 1930s, it became figurative, where we use it to refer to this sense of anticipation.

Grant.

Got to have the Rocky Horror mention in there, right?

Right.

So that’s pretty much what we know about this phrase, and I hope this relationship works out if it’s supposed to.

Yeah, I hope so, too.

Thank you so much.

Sure thing.

Yeah, take care, Carmen.

Call us again sometime.

Thank you, I will.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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