The caption promising a payoff — 'wait for it…' — placed over a video whose first five seconds are nothing, so that the viewer stays for the sixth. Standard on TikTok from 2019 and, by 2021, a warning sign that nothing would happen. The record's entry for the phrase that trained a generation to distrust the phrase.
The record notes that Wait for It works on the same principle as a fishing line, and that the platform's watch-time metric rewarded the patience of the fish rather than the honesty of the fisherman.
Sighting in a physical newspaper — Wait for It in a lifestyle column, in quotation marks, with a definition in parentheses. It has left the internet.
My first sighting was 2019, in a reply from someone I have never met, and I understood it immediately. That is the closest thing to magic the internet still does.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
