Salad Days

 

Salad Days

                                                    Cabbage

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In 1606, William Shakespeare’s play, Antony and Cleopatra, has Cleopatra lamenting her youthful passionate relationship with Antony. She says of that time, ‘My salad days, when I was green in judgment.’

Salad days were the days of our sometimes intemperate youth, when passion overruled reason and there was a degree of carefree innocence and unaccountability. How delicious it was to please ourselves, to have no responsibilities and to be able to play before the necessities of adult life took over, even though we may have considered ourselves quite mature.

The idiom became popular in the 1850s. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage says:- ‘Whether the point is that youth, like salad, is raw, or that salad is highly flavoured and youth loves high flavours, or that innocent herbs are youth’s food as milk is babes’ and meat is men’s, few of those who use the phrase could perhaps tell us; if so, it is fitter for parrots’ than for human speech.’

I found that definition quite confusing – is salad highly flavoured? I suppose it can be. The reference to the phrase being better fitted to parrots’ speech suggests that it’s an idiom that is used without thought, and perhaps that is correct.

Sometimes, using the adjective ‘green’ implies inexperience or ignorance. ‘He’s young, no experience, a bit green.' In 1865, one person wrote the following, demonstrating the foolishness of (his) youth. He was trying to buy a horse and looked in the classified advertisements:-

 ‘Being in want of a horse at the time — it was in my salad days, reader — looked through the advertisements in The Times, and noticed one which at any rate promised well.’

 Today, ‘salad days’ refers to a time of life when a young person is full of energy and enthusiasm and potential. It no longer implies thoughtlessness or silliness.

There used to be a phrase, I think from the North of England, ‘I’m not as green as I’m cabbage-looking’. Here, green means inexperienced and cabbage-looking means uneducated, or simple. A cabbage is roughly the same size as a human head and cabbage and cabbage-head have long been terms of abuse for a dullard.

However, I have read that a more modern interpretation of green is used on TikTok. A ‘green person’ is someone who came into another person’s life and made a difference, maybe even saving them from themselves (!). A green person knows and understands you more than anyone else in your life. Green characterises progress and kindness.

Language evolves! and TikTok remains a mystery to me.