'On the bubble' appears to have spawned the expression 'bubbling under', as describing songs which are on the verge of breaking into the top twenty charts. The meaning of bubble is still rather speculative. The Indianapolis origin is fairly well documented. Another suggestion is the bubbling of a saucepan as the water is on the verge of boiling. The film titled Bubble Boy, produced in 2001, is the story of a boy named Jimmy Livingston born with no immune system and is forced to live inside a sterilized plastic bubble in his bedroom. Other possible derivations are the bubbles in spirit levels which accurately display the threshold between verging one way or the other. The question is of course, why 'bubble'? The most popular theory relates to the Indy 500 and suggests that if a driver were about to qualify and then someone did a better time and pushed him down the rankings into the non-qualifiers then dreams of qualification would be dashed and his bubble would be burst. The qualify event at Indianapolis is known as 'Bump Day' or 'Bubble Day'. The first citation I can find is from a report on the 1970 running of that race, in The Lima News, May 1970: This American expression seems to have originated in the car racing community, in particular the aficionados of the Indianapolis 500 race. What's the origin of the phrase 'On the bubble'? On the threshold finely balanced between success and failure for example, if a qualifying competition for an event allowed the top eight runners to proceed to the next round then those who were close to qualification and could get through by a small increase in performance would be said to be 'on the bubble'.
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