Call us crazy dreamers, but once we got digging into the story behind the expression pie in the sky, we found ourselves drifting off into musings about a similar term.
We begin with pie in the sky. That phrase has its origin in "The Preacher and the Slave," a folk song from the early 1900s. Written by labor organizer Joe Hill, the song closes with the lines:
You will eat, by and by
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
By 1915, when Joe Hill's execution solidified his folk hero status, his phrase, a byword for an unrealistic enterprise or prospect of prosperity, was also well established in the lexicon.
But even before Hill had cooked up pie in the sky, the reverie-minded had been dubbed another yummy-sounding name: lotus-eater.
That name was born in Greek myth, when the wandering Odysseus encountered a tribe of lotus-eaters on the Libyan coast. When his men indulged in the mysterious plant offered by their hosts, they were overcome by a blissful forgetfulness and had to be dragged back to the ship and chained to the rowing bench in order to get them to resume their duties.
Since the early 1800s, folks who give themselves over to indolence or daydreams—hardly the agitators associated with Joe Hill—have been known as lotus-eaters.