pie in the sky
nounEtymology
The phrase is originally from the song “The Preacher and the Slave” (1911) by Swedish-American labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill (1879–1915), which he wrote as a parody of the Salvation Army hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By” (published 1868). The song criticizes the Salvation Army for focusing on people’s salvation rather than on their material needs: : You will eat, bye and bye, : In that glorious land above the sky; : Work and pray, live on hay, : You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
Definitions
A fanciful notion
A fanciful notion; an unrealistic or ludicrous concept; the illusory promise of a desired outcome that is unlikely to happen.
- Don't you think I have anything better to do than go scrambling around hundreds of square miles of the toughest wilderness in the state looking for pie in the sky?
- Old Hare Krishna got nothing on you / Just keep you crazy with nothing to do / Keep you occupied with pie in the sky
Alternative form of pie-in-the-sky.
- Pete McCleave first heard about stem cells during his sciences degree in the 1990s. “I knew about them, I just didn’t know what they could be used for,” he says. “It all sounded very pie in the sky.”
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for pie in the sky. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA