Green lights, green brains and Green Thursday

Hello and welcome to this week’s SoundCzech, which has something of a motoring theme to it. Today, we’re listening to vintage Czech rockers Olympic and, more specifically, their song ‘Když ti svítí zelená’ (in English ‘When you get the green light’). The title of the song is, as you might have guessed, also the phrase to listen out for. So, here it is, at the end of the first verse, ‘jed’, když ti svítí zelená’:

The road back is already gone, sings the singer, so ‘jeď’, když ti svítí zelená’– ‘go when you get the green light’, or ‘go, when the light turns green’. ‘Go when you get the green light’ is possibly better because, literally, the phrase translates into English as ‘go when for you the green light shines’. ‘The green light’ has the same figurative meaning in Czech as it does in English - in other words, it’s a synonym for ‘the go-ahead’. So, if you ‘dáš někomu zelenou’ that means you ‘give them the green light’, and you might hear a Czech say ‘máš zelenou’, meaning ‘you’ve got the green light’, or ‘you’ve got the go-ahead’.

And now on to a particular Czechism: the concept of a ‘zelená vlna’ or ‘green wave’. ‘Zelená vlna’ is actually the name of the traffic news bulletins here on Czech Radio, and is an idea I had never heard of before coming to this country. A ‘zelená vlna’ or ‘green wave’ is the phenomenon of one traffic light turning green after another just as you approach it, guaranteeing plain sailing, or plain cruising, around about a town. Apparently, if you drive at the recommended speed limit in a given area, Czech traffic lights are programmed so that you should experience a ‘zelená vlna’.

And finally, here are some other green-tinged idioms that you might stumble across in the Czech Republic. Regular listeners of SoundCzech might remember that the word for a newbie or ‘greenhorn’ in Czech is ‘zelenáč’, translating into English as a ‘green person’, I suppose. If you’ve been in the army too long and you’ve developed a rather militaristic way of thinking you could be dubbed in Czech a ‘zelenej mozek’ or a ‘green brain’, and for those interested in Czech religious tradition, Maundy Thursday in this country is actually called ‘Zelený čtvrtek’ or ‘Green Thursday’. Apparently, Czechs are supposed to eat green things in particular on the day preceding Good Friday.

So there you have it, I hope that you get the green light to use some of these phrases one of these days soon. But for now, it’s na shledanou from me!