Pylimitics

Spring is here, so it’s getting to be time for gardening. If you’re good at gardening, you’re said to have a “green thumb.” But get on a plane from New York to London and somewhere along the way a strange anatomical effect occurs: the green leaves your thumb and seeps sideways, and by the time you land in England, you have “green fingers” instead. 

“Green fingers” seems to have come first. The oldest citation is from a 1906 novel by Mary Stuart Boyd, which included the line “What old wives call ‘green fingers’: those magic digits that appear to ensure the growth of everything they plant.”

“Green thumb” didn’t appear until 1937, when the Daily Globe in Ironwood, Michigan published “Besides being green-eyed, Miss Dvorak has what is known as ‘the green thumb.’”

There might be a slightly earlier precedent, though, from the 1300s. In the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer wrote that the miller “hadde a thombe of gold.” The trouble is that nobody is quite sure what Chaucer meant. It could have meant that the miller was good at farming. Or it could have referred to the color of the grain, which would have been evident on the miller’s hands. It might even have meant that the miller was just a little bit shady — a gold thumb would be heavier than the normal kind, so maybe Chaucer was implying that heavy thumb found its way onto the scale when measuring out flour. 

More recently, “green” has been used in an environmental sense beyond just gardening; the expressions “green movement,” “green energy,” “green economy,” and the like have all appeared since the 1970s. The original use of green might have stemmed from hands being stained the actual color green, but this genre of green terms has been more metaphor than realism for at least a century. 

If your particular talent has to do with metaphors instead of gardening, I wonder what color that makes your thumb?