Meaning of AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN - A Really Short English Lesson with Subtitles

So in English if we say something is an "accident waiting to happen" it means that we think

that sometime in the near future something is going to go wrong with that thing.

The best example I can give is: think about an old building that's starting to fall apart.

You could describe that old building as an accident waiting to happen.

Because you know at some point the building is going to fall down and we're just all waiting

for that to happen.

So you could describe it as an accident waiting to happen.

We can also describe people this way.

It's not a nice way to describe people, but you can say, "My cousin is an accident waiting

to happen."

You would use this to describe someone who, no matter what they do in life it doesn't

seem to go well or whenever they try to do something it goes wrong.

So you could say they're an accident waiting to happen.