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Idiom: Drop the ball
The Idiom drop the ball is often used to criticize someone for making a mistake or mishandling things.
When you are responsible for making things happen, and someone accuses you of dropping the ball, it’s a harsh critique of how you have done or failed to do your job.
Imagine you are a basketball player in a championship game, down two points with 10 seconds left on the clock.
You are in a position to make a three-point shot and win the game.
So you jump, aim, somehow fumble and drop the ball.
That would be a disaster, right?
I mean, you’d have to run off the court to avoid the things people may throw at you.
That may be how many politicians feel at the moment.
We say that no one could have predicted a pandemic like this, but the truth is, it was predicted.
We have had multiple opportunities to prepare for this with Sars, Mers, Ebola and other recent epidemics.
Our leaders dropped the ball.
Not only did they drop the ball, but they then shot it full of holes.
Look at America, for example.
Well, five million cases of COVID-19 certainly make everyone think of America First, but surely that is not what good ol’ Trumpy had in mind.
How about Abe and his abenomask fiasco, or the 2% inflation goal that gets further away every year?
If those are not perfect examples of what it means to drop the ball, I’d be interested in hearing what is.
So, there you have it.
When you drop the ball, you make a big mistake or mishandle things badly.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 75.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.