"tomorrow is not a promised" correctnesss [closed]
Is it a correct expression? Seems to figure in quotes but I can't find a decent source in regards to correctness.
Solution 1:
It is not "grammatical" in the sense that it would be accepted in widespread use.
Having Googled around a bit, I've convinced myself that this is some sort of religious formula or shibboleth, and a recent one at that.
Religious formulas often adopt unusual constructions for their primary purpose of separating in-group from out-group.
Indeed, the earliest reference I can find is in a 2012 religious tract, The Transforming Believer by Zulibe Turner of Reading, UK.
Time waits for no body, and tomorrow is not a promised to anyone.
Whether this is intentional, or a typo that got through proofreading, is not apparent. I also noticed an unusual use of "no body" for "nobody".
Edwin Ashworth and Colin Fine suggest that this formation is a deliberate neologism, along the lines of "a given", and this may very well be, but there are other possibilities including simple error.
The apparent error in this phrase is the use of the article "a" with "promised". "Promised" is almost never used as a noun - the only time I have encountered it is 19th-century costume dramas where "my promised" was a synonym for "my betrothed".
More common uses of "promised" are as a verb (You promised me) or as an adjective (the promised land)
So we might more commonly say
Tomorrow is not a promised day
(which appeared more frequently in religious quotes during my search)
Or of course we can use "promise" as a noun:
Tomorrow is not a promise
But Ms Turner's phrasing does not fit either of these patterns; she says tomorrow is not "a promised to anyone". Assuming this was intentional and not a mistake, the only way I can resolve it is to claim the word "a" is not an article here - it's an archaic prefix, sometimes attached to to a word (he lay abed) or but often hyphenated (Simple Simon went a-fishing, for to catch a whale).
One use of the "a-" prefix is to mean "completely". This would give us
Tomorrow is not a-promised to anyone
and would be grammatical, if unusual.