Waiting For the Other Idioms to Drop

I like a good idiom as much as the next guy.  Instead of multi-tasking I'll "kill two birds with one stone".  Rather than telling secrets I'll "let the cat out of the bag".  In lieu of unintentionally getting in my own way I'll "shoot myself in the foot".  And "once in a blue moon" I'll "turn a blind eye" to doing the right thing by "biting off more than I can chew" in an attempt to "pull the wool over someone's  eyes" usually resulting in me "getting a taste of my own medicine" which, I assure you, while merited, is "no walk in the park".  And while "it isn't over until the fat lady sings", it almost always marks "the beginning of the end" where I somehow end up "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."  When will I learn my lesson?  Who knows... "when pigs fly?"

So yeah, I appreciate an age-old phrase that "hits the nail on the head" so to speak.  But here's the thing: I need it to be definitive, with no room for doubt, no thinking that it only works in some instances.  And that takes me  to a stock idiom that's been in place since the late nineteenth century: "Waiting for the other shoe to drop".  "In a nutshell", the phrase means "anticipating an inevitable negative event occuring following a preceding negative event", as in "They laid off thirty people so far; I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop".  Again, this was coined a long time ago, back when lives were simpler, when maybe only two things could go wrong in succession.  Today that would qualify as a pretty good day.  Hell, even better.  As in "Hey, only two shoes dropped today... alright!"  

Okay, let me give you the origin story for a little perspective: As I'd pointed out, this idiom dates back to around the end of the 1800s when New York city was in the midst of an apartment building boom.  With the flats designed similarly, the bedrooms would be located above and beneath one another.  Couple that with poor insulation and you had a noise factor that was "off the charts" (coincidentally, a phrase coined around the same time).  Thus it happened that when a person upstairs came home after a long day at work and plunked one shoe onto the floor it would cause the tenant downstairs to wait anxiously-- likely accompanied by an eyeroll and a heavy sigh--for the other shoe to drop so they could finally exhale and enjoy a relatively quieter time.  So yeah, as idioms go, this one has a great backstory and makes perfect sense and my singling it out is, what, just another excuse for a lame blog?... (how dare you).

I admit, the "thorn in my side" is the tacit agreement that these negative events only come in twos.  I mean, what if the guy upstairs dropped the first shoe, realized he was making a racket and, trying to be the good neighbor, put the other one down on the floor gently?  Or maybe he dropped them both at the same time.  What if he was a one-legged guy?  And who says it's a man?  Could be a woman emptying out her entire shoe collection in search of the perfect pair for the upcoming dance fest.  Or possibly, there's a party going on and they're playing Cornhole up there, the loud thuds being the result of bean bags hitting the floor ad infinitum.  Talk about "adding insult to injury".  That wouldn't just "rub me the wrong way, it'd "drive me right up the wall". Hell, I'd end up "going off the deep end", "blowing a gasket" right then and there.  Man, I'd "give them a piece of my mind"!... Sorry, I digress.      

Bottom line?... this preponderance with twos just doesn't do it for me (unless we're talkin' tangoing).  I mean, I get the rule of threes because it works well in stories and joke telling when attempting to make things more memorable and, yeah, "a bit of a stretch" at times when you're associating the trio with bad luck or death but this two and out thing regarding negative events just "doesn't cut the mustard".  "In a nutshell", I'm not "taking the moral high ground" here but I am "taking it with a grain of salt". And while I could "play devil's advocate" by admitting that, yes, oftentimes an adverse incident will quickly follow another, I choose not to "add fuel to the fire".  I figure in these hyper-frenzied times, if you hear a shoe fall upstairs it just might be that of a big-ass centipede coming home from a long day's work, his footwear removal just getting underway.  "Food for thought", right?