Hanging by a thread?

Reader question:

Please explain “hanging by a thread” in this passage:

“How are you, Mr. Brown?”

“I’m just hanging by a thread,” said Mr. Brown.

“Is it as bad as that?” asked Mr. Hunter.

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Mr. Brown, “only for this numbness in my legs, and I’ve got cataracts and can’t half see, and I had a dentist make me a set of teeth and he says they fit, but they don’t, they slip, and I had double pneumonia last winter and the doctor gave me some drugs that addled me. And I’m still addled.”

My comments:

Mr. Brown, old in age apparently, believes he’s not long for this world.

He’s like a spider dangling in the air, hanging on by a thin thread. Any time now, he’s about to drop and drop dead.

That’s the idea.

But no. Mr. Brown is all right. He’s not dying, even though he has a lot of problems, numbness in the legs, cataracts in the eyes, etc. and so forth.

No, but no. Mr. Brown is not close to death. Saying so is just Mr. Brown’s way of exaggeration as they carry on a conversation, as old men are wont to do.

Actually, he’s fine – fine for his age, considering everything.

Now, back to “hanging by a thread”. You may get away with thinking that the idiom “hanging by a thread” comes from watching a spider hanging in the air by a thin, almost invisible thread. But it’s not the case.

As an idiom, “hanging by a thread” comes from the Greek legend popularly known as the Sword of Damocles, as TheIdioms.com explains:

The idiom “hang by a thread” originates from the ancient Greek anecdote of the Sword of Damocles. Damocles was a courtier in the court of King Dionysius II of Syracuse. He often flattered the king, expressing envy for his power and wealth. To teach Damocles a lesson about the burdens and dangers of authority, Dionysius offered to switch places with him for a day. During the lavish banquet, Damocles noticed a sharp sword hanging directly above his head, suspended by a single horsehair. This experience made him realize the constant peril that accompanies positions of power.

See?

TheIdioms.com also gives an early example of “hanging by a thread” in print:

One of the earliest instances is found in the book The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, published in 1791, where it is noted:

“Sir, a man’s life should be valued at more than to be left to hang by a thread.”

This makes sense. I mean, the Sword of Damocles being the origin of “hanging by a thread” makes more sense than a spider hanging by a thread. The Sword over Damocles hanging by a single hair is ominously dangerous whereas a spider hanging by a thread is not.

Quite the opposite. The spider is in its element hanging onto a thread swinging in the air.

It can be moving from place to place or it can be resting and relaxing while hanging by a thread of its own making. Whatever the case, the spider is having a good time.

The spider’s position is not precarious by any sense of the word. It is in no danger whatsoever.

Unlike the position Damocles found himself in, of course.

Anyways, “hanging by a thread” has become synonymous with the fragility, risk and danger inherent with various situations people find themselves in.

And here are a few very recent media examples:

1. Each day creates a new “surely it cannot go on like this” moment, and then it indeed goes on and the pyre of death and suffering in Gaza rises a little higher. But this week feels different, like something profound in the global perspective on Gaza is shifting. Is it vain or naive to think it might be the beginning of the end, finally?

A rising chorus of military, political and activist voices has been calling for a cease-fire and an end to the blockade of humanitarian aid – and to the charade of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a controversial ad hoc service that has managed to deliver some aid but at an appalling cost to the people of Gaza. Observers around the world have grown weary of the images of starving children and desperate people gunned down while trying to collect bags of flour or boxes of food.

Recent reports out of Gaza are heartbreaking and bleak. A colleague in Gaza told Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, the primary U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees: “People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.”

Humanitarian groups fear a wave of starvation deaths is inevitable even if aid flows are quickly restored. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, 50 people in Gaza died because of malnutrition in July. Of the 115 who have died because of hunger in Gaza since 2023, 81 were children, the ministry reports.

The U.N. World Food Program believes more than 100,000 women and children are facing famine levels of starvation. The entire population of Gaza, more than 2.1 million people, are threatened by a high degree of food insecurity. The International Rescue Community said its teams in Gaza have experienced a surge in cases of children being rushed to the hospital because of hunger.

“Their small bodies are shutting down. They can’t breathe, their immune systems are collapsing, and they are highly vulnerable to infection,” I.R.C.’s acting director in the occupied Palestinian Territories, Scott Lea, said in a statement on July 23. “Their lives are hanging by a thread.”

- ‘Lives hanging by a thread’: Looking at hunger and starvation in Gaza, AmericaMagazine.org, July 24, 2025.

2. One of President Donald Trump’s most persistent legal foes is going after the Epstein files.

Norm Eisen – the former White House ethics chief under former President Barack Obama and a longtime critic of Trump – has filed a sweeping Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation hand over any files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein that may reference the former president.

“The govt’s credibility is hanging by a thread – & now they’re pushing a lie the MAGA base isn’t even buying!” Eisen wrote on X. “We filed FOIAs to find the truth, because the Epstein files are real, & so is the Trump regime’s threat to democracy.”

“The public needs to know what these files say about the most powerful man in the world – and what Trump’s appointees in government, such as Bove, Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel, knew and when they knew it,” Eisen added in a Substack post.

The president has faced a revolt among his conspiracy-minded supporters since the Justice Department and FBI concluded in a July 6 memo that Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial in prison, rather than being murdered, and that no “client list” of wealthy co-conspirators exists. The news has sparked a backlash and calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to resign.

“Trump, of course, wants us to talk about anything but this,” he said.

Earlier this month, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accused Obama of cooking up intelligence on Russian election interference in a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump, which critics have assailed as a thinly veiled attempt to distract from the controversy.

- Obama Official Files Bombshell Demand for Epstein Files and Secret Trump Messages, TheDailyBeast.com, July 28, 2025.

3. Khadidah Stone will never forget the day in 2023 she learned that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld voting rights in her home state of Alabama.

She was in a store when her phone buzzed, flooded with messages. “I was standing in the aisle crying,” she recalled. “And the guy at the front of the store was like, ‘Ma’am, are you OK?’”

Stone, 28, was one of the plaintiffs in Allen v. Milligan, arguing that Alabama needed two majority-Black congressional districts to accurately reflect its Black voter population. The court agreed, deciding that a map with one majority-Black district likely violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the crowning achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.

“I cried because I was like, ‘Dang, there’s hope,’” Stone, the director of network capacity at Alabama Forward, a nonpartisan civic engagement organization, told Capital B. “To be honest, I didn’t think that we would win because I knew that this was the John Roberts Court, that it was leaning conservative.”

The Montgomery native’s advocacy journey began at the age of 13, when her father was sentenced to 60 years in prison for selling marijuana. She became determined to learn about criminal justice, she said. And eventually, this interest prompted her to think about other freedoms – including voting rights in Alabama.

But Stone’s joy has now evaporated. In the years since that courtroom victory, the future of the Voting Rights Act has appeared increasingly uncertain, as litigation threatens key provisions of the most important federal statute protecting the right to vote. Six decades after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, advocates say, Black political power is hanging by a thread.

Alabama Republicans in June appealed the years-long redistricting battle to the Supreme Court. They hope to convince the court’s conservative justices to scale back the protections that a section of the Voting Rights Act provides against dilution in the map-drawing process.

This was only a few weeks before the court punted a decision in Louisiana v. Callais – a high-profile case that concerns this same section and a controversial congressional map – to next term. Some legal scholars worry that the court might use the case to further erode the Voting Rights Act.

Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, told Capital B that this section is the “last leg” that the Voting Rights Act is standing on.

“The decision in Allen v. Milligan should be controlling,” she said. “It’s a problem that the court has taken up [the Louisiana case]. This very clearly signals that it’s not bound by its own precedents, even precedents issued two years ago.”

- The Voting Rights Act Turns 60. Its Future Has Never Looked More Fragile.CapitalNews.org, by Brandon Tensley, August 1, 2025.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）