Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
salad days
It was not youth’s vigor, but its inexperience and lack of judgment that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra was referring to when she contrasted her present love for Antony with the days of her former love for Caesar: “My salad days, When I was green in judgement: cold in blood” (Antony and Cleopatra, I.v.73). But today salad days has changed into a metaphor rather for unflagging, enthusiastic youth. If you want your readers to have Shakespeare’s original sense of it, you must help them with context.
