Wait—you weren’t driving while reading this, were you? Are you safe somewhere other than behind the wheel of a moving car? Fine. But now we want you to think back to one thing that you often encounter in other situations: the green light.
Since the 1950s, ‘lit up’ has lost its place to ‘lighted’ as the past tense of ‘light’.
Much less obtrusive than its seemingly ubiquitous red cousin, the green light is of course the signal on the traffic light notifying the driver to go. figuratively, green light refers to the authority or permission to proceed. It is also used as a verb. Green-lighting something, such as a project, means empowering or allowing it to proceed—figuratively green-lighting it.
Verb green light commonly used especially in the business world and in the entertainment business world. It is not new: our current evidence dates back to 1941. (The noun is only slightly older, with current evidence dating back to 1937.)
But when the verb is used, it doesn’t have to be obvious when it comes to that unpleasant past tense:
second season of Big and small lies was officially green-lit with a seven-episode order last year, with stars and executive producers Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon both returning. —Emma Dibdin, ElleJanuary 24, 2018
In the interview, after years of gently mocking the relaxed but not cold atmosphere of Portland, Oregon, Portandia is in the final season. Series co-star Carrie Brownstein unpacks the show’s humor and tells us how a wedding toast doubled as an audition to get the green light for the show. —Mike Pesca, slateJanuary 26, 2018
We have it: two examples, each representing a different form of competition, green light And green light.
In fact, those are just the two most common of the four forms of competition. green light And green light are also being used.
For most of this verb’s history, green light is the most preferred choice, as several corpus including quotations from the last century demonstrate:
More and more common, screenwriters working to get the green light for a movie are merely standing at the top of a carousel designed by producers and studios to create hits using the tool. exactly, send their script to a small group of other writers to process then… . — Jaime Wolf, New York Times MagazineAugust 23, 1998
But when we look at the block of texts whose evidence all date back to this century, we see another form that clearly prevails:
In the US, the FDA has given the green light to a third round of clinical trials, which could be rolled out in the spring and continued into 2021. — Lauren Gill, weekly newsJanuary 21, 2018
With many new shows green-lit by Netflix, Amazon, and premium cable networks offering fewer episodes a season than a typical network broadcast, the need to embark on a job search more often has increase. — Alex Suskind, New York TimesAugust 18, 2017
Right: green light is rapidly losing its position green lightIts sleek no-hyphen cousin.
This really doesn’t surprise anyone when we consider the fate of the second element of the word. When was the last time you lit a candle or a match? Green light the verb is simply to follow in the worn footsteps of light verb.
Past tense of light traditionally lighting: in 1864 of this company Webster is not shortenedboth verb entries (one in “light a match” and the other in “a bird lights up on the lawn”) are accompanied by a note advising readers about lighting as the past tense but inform them that “sometimes less precise lighting” Used.
But when Google’s ngram tells the story, lighting overcome lighting as the preferred past form of light in books published in the United States in the 1950s, and in the half century since, it has become a definite favorite. (A similar distinction had occurred in British English decades earlier, in the 1910s.)
It looks, then, like green light just a little behind the times. green light simply follow an established pattern.
If you really like it, you can definitely use green light (or green light or green light) as the past tense of green light. In fact, they are still in use. But the domination of green light likely to continue to grow. Most writers and editors gave it a go.
Categories: Usage Notes
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
