salad days
plural noun
William Shakespeare
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When is someone in their salad days?
A good salad is fresh, crisp, and usually green. Those attributes are often associated (in both vegetables and people) with vitality and immaturity. The first English writer known to use salad days to associate the fresh greenness of salad with the vigor and recklessness of youth was William Shakespeare. In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra praises Marc Antony's valor and demands that her serving woman do the same. When the servant instead praises her former consort, Caesar, Cleopatra threatens her—until the woman notes that she is only echoing Cleopatra's own effusive past praise of Caesar. Cleopatra's reply marks the first English use of salad days:
"My salad days,
When I was green in judgment, cold in blood,
To say as I said then."
Synonyms
Examples of salad days in a Sentence
Dieter Kurtenbach, The Mercury News, 19 Nov. 2024
But the Fed’s rate cut is cutting into banks’ net interest income, and has some worried the salad days are over.
—Peter Green, Quartz, 20 Oct. 2024
In the salad days when Beijing was giving the industry a lot of support, these local authorities found ways to involve themselves in the effort through direct investments in EV producers or taking out loans and issuing bonds on behalf of these manufacturers.
—Milton Ezrati, Forbes, 3 Oct. 2024
The salad days that came with the old model have been thrown out, so now nobody knows how to make money.
—Anne Thompson, IndieWire, 20 Sep. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Salad days.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/salad%20days. Accessed 1 Dec. 2024.
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