feast or famine

Either an overabundance or a shortage. This expression originated as either feast or fast, which is how it appeared in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia (1732) and still survived in 1912 (“Dock labour has been graphi- cally described as ‘either a feast or a fast,’” London Daily Telegraph). In Amer- ica, famine was substituted sometime during the twentieth century. The term is still frequently applied to alternating overabundance and shortages of work, as is often the case for freelancers, seasonal laborers, and the like.