green behind the ears

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Some of you may have noticed Barack Obama use the peculiar expression "green
behind the ears" in the Oct. 7 presidential debate. I explored the history of
the phrase in my Word Routes column, with a follow-up on Language Log:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/1572/
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=727


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org