Talk:wait for the ball to drop

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 . 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)