Saint Patrick's Day: maneiras diferentes de usar a palavra Green em Inglês

Tomorrow's saint Patrick's day and I was wondering what I could bring to my blog other than everything else that you can easily find out there on the internet. So I remembered that I'll be giving classes tomorrow about the holiday itself but also be touching on a few other usages for the word green.

If you don't know why green has to do with saint Patrick's day, the only thing I assure you is that there are quite a few possible explanations for that. But I'll leave you with the simplest one: the green stripe on the Irish flag. So now that we've set this aside, let's get down to business:

As a noun, green can also refer to paper money, especially in large amounts. So imagine you just got a new car which by the way is kind of expensive. You show up at your work in it and all your curious friends come up to you to ask how much you paid for it. So they can approach you with a question that will sound something like: "I bet you had to lay down some serious feen for that car, huh? How much was it?" It's not hard to notice that's a very informal way of referring to money.

Still using green as a noun, we have got a second meaning for the word, but this time a little bit less politically correct: marijuana. That's a very common slang by the way, both in Portuguese and English. So if you hear someone saying they got some green, depending on the context they are probably talking about weed. 

So finally talking about green as an adjective, we have got a few things to consider: green can mean immature or inexperienced. One of the first times I heard someone making usage of green to mean inexperienced I was listening to hand in my pocket by Alanis Morissette. She claims to be green in the song but also wise. 

But if you see people defining things and not people by calling them green, we've got a totally new situation. It's just that green can also mean environmentally conscious or designed not to have an adverse impact on the environment, like in building principles, departments, companies, student centers, etc.