salad days
salad days (one’s raw youth) is one of the phrases whose existence depends on single passages (see Ant. and Cleop. I. V. 73 My s. d. when I was green in judgment). Whether the point is that youth, like salad, is green and 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.
