never-never world
1
9.9
- noun
- /ˈnɛvərˈnɛvər wɜrld/
- Literature
- Anyone who believes guns contribute to a high crime rate is living in a never-never world because it is not true.
Examples
-
"He thought about the other Adrian, who now would never exist, except maybe in the never-never world of the wormhole, and how he had caught up with him only when he went the other way.
Fiction book (2001) -
His ideas about ending world hunger felt like a dream from a never-never world, detached from reality.
-
The politician's promises sounded good, but many people believed he was trapped in a never-never world of fantasy.
-
In her stories, she often describes a never-never world where anything is possible and logic does not apply.
Synonyms
31
4.4
An imagined place in your mind with magic and strange creatures
7
8.8
A made-up perfect place that exists only in dreams
3
6.1
An imaginary place where everything is perfect and magical
3
6.6
An imagined perfect place that exists only in dreams
1
8.6
An imaginary place where a person avoids real life and adult duties
1
9.1
An imagined place someone believes is real
Antonyms
How Real
Surface Forms
Morphology
never-never + world
The element 'never' (reduplicated as 'never-never') signals impossibility or nonoccurrence and combined with 'world' plausibly yields an unreal or imaginary place, so a learner who knows the constituents can often infer the general idea. However, the reduplicated form is somewhat lexicalized and tied to idiomatic uses (compare 'Neverland'/'never-never land'), so the exact idiomatic nuance and register may not be fully predictable without exposure.
Etymology
The phrase never-never world may come from children's stories about 'Neverland', a make-believe place where nothing is real and anything can happen. Because never-never repeats 'never', it gives a picture of something that will not happen, so the phrase means 'not real' or 'not practical'.