tomorrow's chip paper
- noun
- UK
:
papel de mañana
- The rumor was everywhere yesterday, but it'll be tomorrow's chip paper soon enough.
Examples
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Politicians know that negative headlines are just tomorrow's chip paper.
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He dismissed their complaints as tomorrow's chip paper, not worth worrying about.
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That's just tomorrow's chip paper.
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It's only tomorrow's chip paper!
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He dismissed their complaints as tomorrow's chip paper, not worth worrying about.
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Politicians know that negative headlines are just tomorrow's chip paper.
-
The rumor was everywhere yesterday, but it'll be tomorrow's chip paper soon enough.
Synonyms
246
1.6
Useless or silly information, for example in unwanted emails
38
3.5
A small interesting piece of information people share
Antonyms
How Important
- Literature
15
2.7
- Literature
3
3.8
- Literature
93
1.1
- Informal
184
1.1
- UK
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense 'unimportant and quickly forgotten' is partially signaled by the constituents: 'tomorrow's' suggests ephemerality and 'chip' evokes smallness or insignificance, so a reader could infer a sense of being trivial and short-lived. However, the specific idiomatic collocation 'chip paper' is rare and the metaphorical jump to this exact meaning is not a standard, fully predictable composition, so a B1 learner who only knows the words would likely need prior exposure to be certain.
Etymology
The noun tomorrow's chip paper may come from the cheap paper used to wrap chips, chip paper, which people eat from and then throw away the next day. So the phrase pictures news or gossip as something 'unimportant' that will be 'quickly forgotten'.