Greek calends

alternative Greek kalends

1. idiomaticpluralplural onlyA time that never occurs; never; when pigs fly.

   My book with Professor [John Ronald Reuel] Tolkien – any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man – is dated, I fear, to appear on the Greek Kalends!

   1950 January 12, C[live] S[taples] Lewis, “Letters: 1950 [To Sister Penelope CSMV (BOD)]”, in Walter Hooper, editor, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, volumes III (Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963), New York, N.Y.: HarperSanFrancisco, HarperCollins, →ISBN, pages 5–6

   1 more example

   Blockheads, friends of my heart and liver, cousins of my tripe, are you ignorant that this symposium is as authentic as any of those tales of the Greek Calends, which you swallow and digest so easily, [...]?

   1923, [François Béroalde de Verville], “Origin of the Decretals”, in Arthur Machen, transl., Fantastic Tales or The Way to Attain—a Book Full of Pantagruelism Now Done for the First Time in English, Carbonnek [i.e., London]: Privately printed, →OCLC, page 98