One of my favorite entries in the Leo Lexicon is "tomorrow's tomorrow." He doesn't say it anymore, of course, since he's now 8 and knows the days of the week.
But back before he went to school, he would reference 'tomorrow's tomorrow' whenever he wanted to talk about the day after tomorrow. I loved the phrase so much I wrote about it here.
He would even say tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow if he was talking about something we might do three days from now. Like Christmas is coming tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow.
(Or as I like to say, if tomorrow had a baby, it would be called tomorrow's tomorrow.)
I sometimes will meet someone in Italy who reminds me of a person I know from my American life. Or vice versa -- an American who is talking to me in English while I am picturing someone in Italy talking and gesturing just like my interlocutor but in Italian.
Similarly, I find my fascination with tomorrow's tomorrow akin to my interest in little Italian linguistic curiosities -- such as domani l'altro. Italians will use that phrase when talking about the day after tomorrow. But it literally means "the other tomorrow." The day after tomorrow is straight forward. Like 2 + 2. The "other" tomorrow? That's got a whole different dimension to it.
I am posting new writing or re-posting existing pieces of writing every day in February. Read more about these little grammatical oddities here.
