Wake up, babe, new Dot Wordsworth just dropped

On X, someone called Henri tweeted: “babe wake up Waste Land new hard as hell cover just dropped.” Appended was a Penguin Classics cover illustrated with an apocalyptic picture which I think was a work from 2010 called The Harrowing of Hell, by David Adams. It turned out to have been put together using an online device called Penguin Classics Cover Generator, which allows you to use your chosen picture to design a paperback. The site has no connection with Penguin. But “Wake up, babe, new [something] just dropped” is a catchphrase or meme that has been around since 2020. Drop, a verb favored by the trendy to mean “arrive” or “be published or released” has been used since the 1980s for records, but is still thought to be hip.

Drop is having a creative time at the moment. People who use X are worried about dropshipping. Handy gadgets are advertised for sale, but the advertiser doesn’t stock the dog toy, or whatever the thing is. He merely gets a supplier (perhaps in China) to deliver it to the buyer and makes money from his mark-up as middle-man.

Another thing that drops is the other shoe, for which we wait. “Waiting for the other shoe to drop” must date from the advent of apartment-living and expresses the suspense with which downstairs neighbors await the next percussion after the warning shot, as the man upstairs prepares for bed. There is no recognized begetter of the phrase. It became popular between the wars, when Pont’s cartoon “Life in the flat above” showed the family upstairs jumping and thumping, with the daughter pulling a little wagon unstably piled with pots and pans and even the dog wearing boots. Michael Quinion in his World Wide Words blog traced an American quotation from 1921: “If nine out of ten of us hadn’t heard that ‘drop that other shoe’ chestnut and molded our lives accordingly for the sake of the neighbor below us, what would be the end of us?” Now, I think we’ve seen what.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2025 World edition.