if push comes to shove

Example: “If push comes to shove, we can sleep in the car.”

Origin: The earliest clear print appearance is from 1889, in The Weekly Floridian, though the Oxford English Dictionary traces the expression further back to 19th-century African American usage, where it captured the moment words demanding action finally had to be backed up by actual action — a push escalating into something more forceful. A separate, later theory ties the figurative sense to rugby, where opposing forwards physically push and shove against each other in a scrum, with this specific sporting usage dated to the 1950s. Wiktionary itself describes the phrase's etymology as incomplete, and no source manages to definitively settle which account, if either, is the genuine origin.