Does the expression 'salad days' sound old-fashioned to a native speaker nowadays? [closed]

I was fascinated when I first came across the phrase "salad days". I thought "in my salad days" sounded much more of a literacy style than the common expression "when I was young".

But when I tried to use this phrase in front of a native English speaker, he pointed out that it is an old-fashioned expression that hardly anyone uses nowadays. I sought verification from another native speaker and he simply said that he had never heard of it, not to mention using it.

Then I looked up "salad days" in the dictionaries and LDOCE (Longman) tags it "old-fashioned" while M-W says it is "somewhat old-fashioned".

Finally I fell back on English Corpus and found "salad days" actually was still in use in newspapers and magazines, for example.

The numbers provided further evidence that Netflix’s salad days may be over, particularly in the U.S., where most households that want its 12-year-old streaming service already have it. — Washington Post, "Netflix’s US subscriber growth slowing as competition looms," 16 Oct. 2019

Back during the salad days of their relationship, Ms. Cooper and Mr. Weah traveled together to Monte Carlo and Mexico. — Helene Cooper, New York Times, "Liberia Holds a Free Election. Make That ‘Free-for-All.’," 6 Oct. 2017

I also checked youtube videos and found that "salad days" is also used by some of young youtubers as well as some celebrities in their spoken English in a talkshow.

Does salad days fit the definition of an old-fashioned word or expression?

Solution 1:

Just addressing the expression “salad days”, I would say that (despite the dictionaries) its limited contemporary use reflects that fact that it is more a literary or poetic metaphor than old-fashioned usage.

As all educated people once (and there‘s the rub†) knew, the expression comes from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra:

My salad days,
When I was green in judgement, cold in blood,
To say as I said then!

The fact that it was reused as the title of a musical in the 1950s suggests a certain exotic feel to the expression, rather than it being a common synonym for “youth”. To be old-fashioned an expression must have been popular at one time, and I remain to be convinced that this is the case. — I do not ever recall hearing it in conversation. Ordinary people avoid using literary expressions in popular speech, and educated people would tend to avoid bathetic use. Journalists, however, as the quotations in the question attest, were and are different.

The Google books ngram shows little use of the expression before about 1840, hitting a peak of popularity at about 1900. Its overall use has remained steady since then, with a recent increase in the US. However the late 20th and early 21st century hits in the ngram to some extent reflect the numerous cookery books and articles using this as catchy/glib title. I imagine many young people today are unaware of the literary illusion, although the novelists and biographers continue to recycle it.

In conclusion, “salad days” would seem to be no less “in fashion” than a hundred years ago. Its relatively limited usage — which has not changed much — would seem to reflect its literary nature and, in this respect, its lack of originality.

†An old-fashioned literary expression (Don’t try it at home.)