Keiva wonders about the origin of "You're all wet!" in another post, and it brought to my mind another expression that means someone is naive or inexperienced: Greenhorn.
But why greenhorn? Anyone know? Bovine origins? I never seen no cow wit green horns, no never.
Edit: this baby pretty quickly got shanghaied by the uniform debaters so I thought I would edit the title so people could remember where to find that scintillating discussion....! 
From The Word Detective:
A "greenhorn" is simply a newcomer or inexperienced person, especially a novice in a trade or business. "Greenhorn" first appeared back in the 15th century meaning a young ox with new, or "green," horns. ("Green" has been used as a metaphor for "young" or "inexperienced," by analogy to a young plant, for hundreds of years.) By about 1650, "greenhorn" was being applied to newly-enlisted army recruits, and shortly thereafter "greenhorn" came to mean any inexperienced person. Unfortunately, since the naive among us can easily be hornswoggled, "greenhorn" can also sometimes mean "sucker" or "simpleton."
Still, I'd rather be thought a "greenhorn" than a "tinhorn," which since the late 19th century has been slang for a pretentious and flashy but cheap and contemptible person. The original "tinhorns" were "tinhorn gamblers" in the Old West, addicted to a low-stakes game called "Chuck-a-luck," in which dice were tumbled in a small metal contraption known as a "tin horn." Serious gamblers looked down on such "tinhorn gamblers," and by the end of the 19th century "tinhorn" had come into general usage as an adjective meaning "cheap" and "contemptible." A similar adjective, "tin-pot" (often heard in phrases such as "tin-pot dictator"), arose in the early 19th century by analogy to the perceived shoddiness of tin cookware.
I first looked in Brewer's Phrase and Fable. They didn't have greenhorn, but they did have the following entry, whose def. made no sense to me at all:
Green Linnets The 39th Foot, so called from the colour of their facings. Now the Dorsetshire, and the facings are white.
Green Linnets The 39th Foot, so called from the colour of their facings. Now the Dorsetshire, and the facings are white.
____________
Army reference - 39th Foot (presumably regiment) which had green facings on their uniforms. A number of regiments have been amalgamated over the years, so I guess that's what happened to the 39th Foot who had to give up their green facings when they became the Dorsetshire and adopt the new white ones.
As to Greenhorns, I would probably say that someone was 'still wet behind the ears'.
Jackie is puzzled by:
In reply to:
Green Linnets The 39th Foot, so called from the colour of their facings. Now the Dorsetshire, and the facings are white.
The 39th Foot is a regiment, which was later called the Dorsetshire. Facings are part of their uniform: the frilly bits at the front of eighteenth and nineteenth century (?) soldiers' uniforms, I think. Rhuby, when did khaki come in? Something at the back of my mind is saying Boer War.
Bingley
I've often confused these two terms, and I'm sure other folks have too.
Tinhorn originally referred to gamblers, usually in the Old American (US) West, who were pretentious braggarts but who were unskilled and ineffective. And sometimes, it seems to me, the term was used to imply a new or naive gambler, especially in some of the old Hollywood Westerns, so this could be the cause for the two words being used interchangeably in some quarters. This is from
American Heritage:
SYLLABICATION: tin·horn
PRONUNCIATION: tnhôrn
NOUN: Slang A petty braggart who pretends to be rich and important.
ETYMOLOGY: From the horn-shaped metal can used by chuck-a-luck operators for shaking the dice.
OTHER FORMS: tinhorn —ADJECTIVEAnd here's a great discussion on the origins of
tinhorn and
greenhorn, and how they may have acquired a shared meaning, from
Quinion:
http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-tin2.htm
I seem to recall Green Linnet as being a record label (company) which specialized in Celtic music -- and wondered about the genesis of the name.
http://home.mn.rr.com/wwftd/
Absolutely right, Bingley. Red uniforms were just too easy to hit under those conditions, whereas khaki tended to blend with the colour of the veldt. Not that that actually seems to have prevented the Boer sharpshooters from wreaking havoc among the Brit Army by there very accurate shooting.
your right tsuwm, green linnet is record label, and yes they specialize in celtic music, they also have a picture of a green linnet on there catalog, and on their labels.
as for why they chose the name, i remember reading about it once in one of there catalogs, but i have totally forgot why. i'll go look and see if they have a web site, and if it gives an explaination.
red uniforms:
Red uniforms were just too easy to hit under those conditions
Interesting, Rhuby...I was ruminating this point just last night while watching a historical film about the Seven Years War. I was wondering when did the British Army become the Redcoats, and who decided that wearing red in the days of open-field warfare was a good idea? Wearing that color was like having a bullseye hanging around your neck despite the notorious inaccuracy of the weapons of the day (which gave true meaning to the term "pot-shot"). Surely they must've realized that green or brown uniforms would have blended in with the background more and made the marching ranks a far more difficult target. Or did they value so little the lives of the enlisted men in those days that they just didn't care? (although the officers wore the same color) Does anyone know the history of the British Army adopting red uniforms as their rule of dress?
red uniforms
Well, it's one of the colors in the British flag, but red is in almost every flag, so that probably doesn't mean anything.
My guess is that it was intended to conceal blood. Doctors (or is it just the patients) today wear those ugly green smocks. The reason for that color is that it's the exact compliment of the color of blood. When the two mix they visually neutralize, making the blood less obvious, I guess. At least that's what they told us in a lecture on color for architecture.
Dear RhubarbCommando: I remember reading a long time ago that khaki originated in India when a unit clad in white was so vulnerable to enemy snipers that their colonel ordered them to rub dirt onto them. Several sources say "khaki" is an Urdu word
khaki - 1857, from Urdu khaki, lit. "dusty,"
from khak "dust," from Pers. First introduced
in uniforms of British cavalry in India (the
Guide Corps, 1846); widely adopted for
camoflage purposes in the Boer Wars.
Facings go back millenia, at least as far as Alexander the Great, who was the first to realize the importance of coordinated movements of troops. Timing is everything. He devised a system whereby different parts of his armies wore different colored head sashes. A wave of a flag from the command post would send say the green band into battle, followed by a flanking movement from the wearers of red on the right. This was the origination of Alexander's Rag Time Bands.
Jazzo, you have to think back to the days before the invention of smokeless powder. Battles were fought by masses of troops arranged in units which advanced like chess men over the field in blocks of varying sizes. Battles usually began with an artillery barrage, which invariably left the field covered in dense smoke. European armies early on (late 17th century, I believe) adopted bright colored uniforms so the troops would be visible in the smoke which generally covered the entire battlefield. Different nations used different colors. The Brits adopted scarlet (a technical term for a particular shade of red), the French wore blue, the Austrians wore white, the Spanish, green. And the sense of professional pride made it hard to give up these colors when smokeless powder and more modern tactics made the colorful uniforms downright hazardous, as has been noted by others, notwithstanding there were lots of old veterans who hated to give up the red and thought khaki was the ugliest color ever invented (which is probably right, with the possible exception of OD [olive drab], which is the U.S. army combat uniform color, or was in my day).
Yeah, what Rhube, BYB and Bingley said. I do remember reading that the Federal blue and southern grey were actually not bad cammo during that liddle fratricidal stoush y'all had in the 1860s, particularly once they had both faded. The blue went to grey, the grey went to butternut.