“Green” has been associated with envy (green-eyed monster), as well as with a novice. How did these associations arise? [closed]
The color green is associated with lack of experience (i.e. novices are called “green”), as well as with envy (“green with envy”, “green-eyed monster”). Does anyone know how, when and why these associations arose?
Green-eyed monster
The OED has Shakespeare’s Othello (a1616) as the first green-eyed monster:
O beware iealousie. It is the greene eyd monster.
Shakespeare earlier used monsterless green-eyed to allude to jealousy in The Merchant of Venice (1600):
Shyddring feare, and greene-eyed iealousie.
The OED says this is "apparently arising from association of jealousy with wrathful or choleric behaviour caused (in the theory of the humours) by an excess of choler or yellow bile".
And their third sense of green, adj. says:
- Of the complexion: having a pale, sickly, or bilious hue, indicative of fear, envy, ill humour, or sickness (also in green and wan, green and pale). Also in extended use. See also green sickness n.
Noting also:
With reference to envy, chiefly in green with envy (also jealousy) at Phrases 8, green eye n. at Compounds 1d(a) (yellow being the traditional colour of jealousy).
Their first such (non-envy?) green is C Brown (a1275):
His bodi þat wes feir & gent & his neb suo scene Wes bi-spit & al to-rend, His rude wes worþen grene.
The origin of the sense “novice” is from fruit and vegetables which when are green, are generally unripe, immature:
From c. 1200 as "covered with grass or foliage." From early 14c. of fruit or vegetables, "unripe, immature;" and of persons, "of tender age, youthful, immature, inexperienced;" hence "gullible, immature with regard to judgment" (c. 1600).
(Etymonline)
The sense of green associated with envy appears to derive from Shakespeare who used the expressions in his works:
Shakespeare described envy as the green sickness (Anthony and Cleopatra, 3:2), but the current phrase (green with envy) dating from the mid-1800s, (in a novel by Henry William Herbert), is the one most often heard.
(Dictionary.com)