salad days, one's

A youthful, carefree time of innocence and inexperience. The phrase comes from a line in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: "My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood." Ah, to be in love in your salad days—such blissful and carefree times! Whenever I ask my grandfather the meaning of a word I hear on TV, he always laughs and says he'll tell me when I'm no longer in my salad days.

The time of youth, innocence, and inexperience, as in Back in our salad days we went anywhere at night, never thinking about whether it was safe or not . This expression, alluding to the greenness of inexperience, was probably invented by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra (1:5), when Cleopatra, now enamored of Antony, speaks of her early admiration for Julius Caesar as foolish: "My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood."

Inexperienced youth, when one is still very green (i.e., unripe). The term comes from Shakespeare, who probably coined it: “My salad days, when I was green in judgement: cold in blood” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5).

A time of youthful inexperience and carefree pleasures, usually looked back on with nostalgia. The phrase came from Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, in which the Queen of the Nile reflected on “My salad days / When I was green in judgment: cold in blood . . .”