Green collar

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 2:16 AM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> In tonight's Washington State gubernatorial debate, Christine Gregoire
> slipped the expression "green collar" into one of her responses,
> referring to people who work in green industries. "Green collar
> worker" gets just over 6000 Googits.
>
> Because the presidential debate had a strong focus on a new-energy
> economy, I thought the word would have been more useful for Obama or
> McCain to use. BB

I believe "green-collar" came up in our '07 WOTY discussion about
"green-" as a combining form (which won the Most Useful category and
came in 2nd to "subprime" in the overall voting). Word Spy dates it to
1984:

http://www.wordspy.com/words/dirty-white-collar.asp


--Ben Zimmer

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