greenery-yallery
English
editEtymology
editFrom green + -ery + nonstandard pronunciation of yellow + -y.
Adjective
editgreenery-yallery (comparative more greenery-yallery, superlative most greenery-yallery)
- Pertaining to the colours green and yellow as used in the style of late-nineteenth-century Aestheticism; hence, typical of Aestheticism; affected. [from 19th c.]
- 1881, WS Gilbert, Patience:
- A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery, / Foot-in-the-grave young man.
- 1945, Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited:
- Nothing greenery-yallery about her. So gay, so correct, so unaffected.
- 2019, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs, Yale University Press, page 106:
- [T]he Abu Dhabi TV show Sha’ir al-Maliyun, ‘Millionaire Poet’ […] is more than some greenery-yallery eisteddfod: in a land where rulers attack their enemies with odes, poetry is still portentous and powerful.