‘It’s got to be greenlighted,’ said my husband, as though saying so made it true.
I had been complaining of the vogue for using greenlit in the sense of both gave the go-ahead and given the go-ahead. In an obituary, the Times noted a low moment in the career of the film executive Frank Price, when ‘he greenlit a sci-fi comedy about an alien duck who finds love on Earth with a singer named Cherry Bomb’. The Observer looked back on the recent history of the National Gallery, when ‘the Sainsbury Wing revamp was greenlit’.
My husband’s reasoning was that when referring to the means by which things are illuminated, one says moonlit, sunlit, lamplit, firelit. When using a figure of speech accidentally employing the word light, such as to moonlight, then one says moonlighted, not moonlit.
I fear language does not abide by logic. In which category would you put highlight? The verb is to my mind highlighted, as the past tense or past participle. Yet the Oxford English Dictionary states that highlit is an established form of the past tense, though it gives no examples among the quotations it furnishes, while giving five quotations with highlighted. In any case, greenlight, first recorded in 1941, had certainly acquired the form greenlit as well as greenlighted by the 1960s.
The first references to a green light on the railways come from 1839. But then a green light still meant ‘caution’, and red ‘stop’. White was widely used for ‘all right’. But, as coloured lights depended on the glass fitted to a paraffin lamp, the danger remained that a red or green glass might fall from a lamp and leave a false white signal. I think the 1890s was the decade for general agreement. A parallel case to greenlight is gaslight, which I wrote about on 20 June 2020. It derives from Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1938) and means ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity’. This term is often now reduced to meaning no more than ‘disagree (with us)’ or ‘suggest that we are mistaken’. Whatever gaslighted meant metaphorically, it was never in the form gaslit. I couldn’t greenlight that.
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