Idiom
Salad days
Your salad days are your youth, especially a time when you were young and inexperienced, or a past period of great success.
How people use it
People use it looking back: in my salad days, I'd stay up all night. It has two shades. The older one stresses being young and naive. The newer, very common one means the best or most successful time of someone's life or career, as in a band's salad days. It is slightly literary and often nostalgic or gently humorous. It is almost always plural and usually follows my, his, their or the.
Examples
- In his salad days, Grandpa hitchhiked across three states with only a backpack.
- The team's salad days were back in the 1990s, when they won four titles.
- Priya laughed at photos from her salad days, when she thought she knew everything.
Where it comes from
It is first recorded in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (around 1606). Cleopatra calls her younger years "my salad days, when I was green in judgment", comparing her youthful self to fresh, green salad leaves. Green was a common word for young and inexperienced. The success sense developed much later.
Check yourself
1. What are someone's salad days?
Answer: Their youthful or best years. Salad days means youth or a past time of success, not a diet.
2. Which sentence uses the idiom correctly?
Answer: In her salad days, she toured the country with a theater group.. Salad days looks back at someone's young or best years.
Similar idioms
Word game fan? See every word hiding in SALAD.