Spent the better part of the day downtown (and will probably spend the better part of the evening there, too) and among the things I saw were a parade and a whole mess of people drinking and wearing green. Since the term parade was covered in an earlier post, aspects of drinking were covered here, here, and here, and a post was even dedicated to saints, that leaves me to talk about variants of "green" used in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016).

As it is, forms of "green" appear 31 times in 13 songs in the collection, mainly taking the bare form green, in addition to taking the comparative form, greener, in "California Gurls," and the superlative form, greenest, in "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and "Candle in the Wind 1997." Nearly all uses of the three forms are in literal reference to color, except for its apparent reference to innocence in "Hurts So Good" and to money in "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down." There are several references (in "The Ballad of the Green Beret") to the American military distinction of the Green Beret, in which the significance of the term extends beyond that of being a mere indicator of color. And in "Everyday People," green is used to offer up a hypothetical (namely, "green one", where "one" means "people"). Otherwise, green is used to describe those things we might expect it to, including willow trees ("On Top of Old Smoky"), the landscape of a place (namely, Tennessee in "The Ballad of Davy Crockett"), one of many colors in a dream ("Kharma Chameleon"), hills ("Candle in the Wind 1997"), grass ("Kiss Me," "California Gurlz"), a banana ("Temperature"), leaves ("Ridin"), and, of course, gator shoes ("Thrift Shop").

I close with the video of a song that did not appear anywhere near the year-end Top Ten and does not even include the word green in it, but I need to hear it every year around St. Patrick's Day, so this seems like as good a place as any:

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