Month of Sundays

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a month of Sundays

Learn how your comment data is processed. Home Idiom Suggestions About. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first printed use of the phrase from A whole month of Sundays. February 21, at 4: February 21, at 5: Give me your two cents Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Do you feel lucky? Our Word of the Year justice , plus 10 more.

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How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. The awkward case of 'his or her'. Identify the word pairs with a common ancestor. I'm going to share how I've always interpreted this idiom, which differs from the well-researched, documented and cited explanations which have been posted: Whenever I've seen it, it's always related to a task that needs to be done in someone's spare time or perhaps, "personal" time would be better. Like a hobby, or a home-improvement job, for which a nice free Sunday is the only time one can find to work on it. This is obviously in the context of the five- or six-day work week in which the weekend, and especially Sunday, is the day of the week free for personal initiatives; a paradigm of western-world industrialization.

So if a task is particularly labour-intensive, or unpleasant, or of very low relative priority, then you are unlikely to get it done, even with 30 Sundays in a row or 31, etc. I accept that this is likely not how the idiom was coined, but I'll bet I'm not the only one who's been using it with this perspective.

Does this fit the context in which you've seen it used? I have always taken "not in a month of Sundays" to mean that someone doesn't want to do something rather than that something won't happen. As the traditional day of rest in many western countries , and because of restrictions on businesses on Sundays they are often considered a day to not do very much, laze about, and have time to get bored.

The idea is that if you had a month of them in a row you would start feeling like you would do anything including things you previously wouldn't want to do to not be bored, and therefore something you wouldn't do even at this point of boredom must be really bad. The literal meaning is just "A week for every day in a month", i.

month of Sundays

A shed is a thing which you could load with goods, so it has a literal meaning "the amount you could fit into a shed", but it's expressed in a comical way to signal that it is not literal, and just means "a lot, probably more than you would expect", whilst also adding humour and possibly improving the meter of the sentence, adding to the imagery, etc. Similarly "a month of Sundays" just means "a very long time" whilst also adding humour, contributing to meter, rhyme, and imagery, etc.

Other answers provided great explanation what "month of Sundays" is. However, I feel like your question is more about "not" part fitting the phrase. The truth is that not isn't part of the idiom here, but is simply a part of the Your mum's not coming to see you phrase.

Replacing the month off with an idiom gives: Your mom will not come to visit you even in a month of Sundays. As per user's answer, Christian people traditionally did nothing on a Sunday, it instead being reserved as a day of rest. Whether I'm imagining this event not happening in a month of say 30 or 31 consecutive Sundays, or just for each Sunday spread over the course of say 30 or 31 weeks, is irrelevant as the meaning is the same.

Thank you for your interest in this question.

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So further discussion here will simply be deleted. Because broadly, "a month of Sundays" means 30 Sundays in a row.

Not entirely impossible but how likely could that really be, please? According to the following source it probably derives from the Christian concept of Sunday as a "day of rest" from which the notion of a very long time: Activities were even regulated on Sunday by law at times and therefore Sunday could seem long and tiresome out of boredom … therefore a month of Sundays could feel like an eternity. It is also sometimes used to denote something that will never happen.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first printed use of the phrase from There are some variations on this, such as: Week of Sundays, Week of Saturdays, etc.

Let me phrase this as a question rather than a quibble. The OED supports the "7 weeks" meaning for "a week of Sundays". But it's impossible to know if this is the original etymology or a later interpretation.

Peter Can you quote it? Often in negative contexts, esp. Two of the first citations and I find [in Google Books] for it are I would give you a month of Sundays and you could not guess; so I will tell you. He would not guess it in "a month of Sundays," neither shall we enlighten him. My guess is that it started with expressions much like these. I'd never encountered the phrase before, and this is exactly the meaning I took from the context. In addition to being logical and what I have always taken it to mean as well , this fits with the example in the question itself.

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