jam tomorrow

名词 n.
中文释义

英文释义

名词 n.
  1. Promised benefits that never arrive. idiomatic,uncountable
    — The “purposive” man ... does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day.
  2. The availability of a resource at a future date. broadly,idiomatic,uncountable
    — The consumption-possibilities curve illustrates the choice which must be made: more jam today means less jam tomorrow; less jam today means more jam tomorrow.

词汇关系

近义词
pie in the sky
衍生词
jam today

词源

From Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where Alice is offered “jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day”. This is a pun on a mnemonic for the usage of jam, iam in Latin (note i/j conflation in Latin spelling), which means “now”, but only in the future or past tense, not in the present (which is instead nunc).
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