Meaning
An event, arrangement or state of affairs that has no fixed date or schedule and shifts as circumstances change, such as a deadline that keeps moving or a festival that follows the seasons. Often slightly ironic in tone. Literary to journalistic register, usually wry about drifting schedules rather than reverent. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The literal term is centuries old in church use: a moveable (or movable) feast is a holy day, most importantly Easter and the feasts offset from it, that falls on a different date each year under rules dating back to the Council of Nicaea, unlike fixed feasts such as Christmas. The figurative sense was popularised by Ernest Hemingway's posthumous 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast about his Paris years. Its epigraph recalls him saying in 1950 that if you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, it stays with you wherever you go, 'for Paris is a movable feast'; the title was suggested by his friend A. E. Hotchner. John Ayto's Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms (2010), cited by Wikipedia, glosses the idiom as an event that takes place at no regular time. Isolated earlier figurative uses may exist, but the 1964 title is what fixed the phrase in general use.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a bit of a moveable feast
- a movable feast
- be a moveable feast
Usage Examples
- The village festival is a moveable feast: it follows the harvest, so the dates change every year.
- Publication day has become a moveable feast, slipping from March to September and back again.
- For freelance translators, home is a moveable feast, defined by wherever the current contract happens to be.