jam tomorrow
- noun
- Informal
:
promesas vacías
- Juniors need money now, not promises of jam tomorrow.
Examples
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The mayor's promise of new parks is just jam tomorrow; we need action today.
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They keep telling us about future improvements, but it's all jam tomorrow.
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Although they claim benefits will come, it feels like jam tomorrow to me.
Synonyms
10
3.8
A promise someone makes without any plan to keep it
Say in a joking way to show you do not expect someone to do what they said
A date that will never come used as a joke to delay something
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
A B1 learner who knows 'jam' and 'tomorrow' will most likely read this literally as 'jam in the future' and will not infer the idiomatic sense of a perpetually postponed or unlikely benefit. The established, culturally specific meaning ('an empty promise' or 'always postponed benefit') cannot be predicted from the constituents and is therefore an idiom that learners need to encounter, making it opaque.
Etymology
Jam tomorrow comes from Lewis Carroll's book, where a character is told she can have jam tomorrow but never jam today, so the sweet treat is always put off. That's why people now use it for a 'promise' of good things later that is unlikely ever to happen.