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pipe dream a fanciful imagining, or unsubstantiated hope
I looked up the origin of this phrase and found that it originally referred to a dream or hallucination someone might have while smoking an opium pipe.
A poster in another forum mentioned this, and I wondered where the phrase came from. Well, people have theories, but I don't think anyone knows. There is a Dutch word used for hide and seek, hoekje. I have no idea how the word would have been pronounced in 19th Century New York, but it is thought that the origin of "playing hooky" might have come from that.
Or, it could have come from another slang phrase, to "hook it" which used to mean, to leave.
At any rate, in the States, everyone knows what "playing hooky" is, and it is no longer considered slang, according to Webster.
for a reader not from the States, playingi hooky means to skip a school day without authorization. People do use it in other ways though. Many of us occasionally "played hooky" from work.
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