in (one's) salad days
In 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 one's 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. After her parents' tragic deaths, that poor girl had to take on a lot of responsibility in what should have been her salad days.
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
in one's salad days
Fig. in one's youth. (Usually formal or literary. Comparing the greenness of a salad with the greenness, or freshness and inexperience, of youth.) I recall the joys I experienced on school vacations in my salad days. In our salad days, we were apt to get into all sorts of mischief on the weekends.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.