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Reader question: Please explain “proverbial shoe” in this passage: My father died when I was four and my grandfather died six months later. Phone calls in the middle of the night always meant someone was sick, dying, or dead. Maybe because of this I am always expecting the worst or for the proverbial shoe to drop. My comments: The other proverbial shoe, that is. The full expression is: waiting for the other shoe to drop. In our example, proverbial means it’s not to be taken literally. Taken literally, “waiting for the other shoe to drop” describes a supposedly commonplace experience of the old days, when people were crowded in department houses that were not well insulated for sound, to say the least. Certainly I’ve heard of a version of this waiting-for-the-other-shoe story. It goes, roughly, as follows: A young clerk who always comes back home from late, around midnight, has a habit of throwing his boots hard down on the floor before he climbs into bed. Exhausted from work, the clerk then goes right into slumber. But the sound of the two heavy boots dropping on the floor gets on the nerves of an old man living in a room right below. To the nervous old man, the two shoes dropping sound no less than two bomb shots. Boom! Boom! The long and short of it is, it comes to a point that every night, the old man lies in bed wide awake waiting for the young man to drop both of his shoes before he can try to get some sleep, if any. | 
