I have been trying to see what is behind the hyped-up phrase "Go Green" and have asked friends to rephrase that buzz-word/cliche, but nobody has given me a satisfactory explanation of what it actually means, in terms of grammar.
When I searched Google for "Go Green & Grammar", I got webpages where they are trying to spread Environmental messages, while teaching English. When I searched for "etymology of go green", I got a wiki entry for "Gringo". When I searched for "what does it mean to go green", I got "Going green means implementing certain lifestyle changes designed to help you live in a more eco-friendly way". I get all this, but I want to know about the grammatical correctness and analysis and etymology.
So here I am , on ELU, asking about it.
I see business PR statements like, "Every year, we have been conducting this event, but this year we decided to go green".
Specifically, I have two Doubts (1) What is the grammatical & Etymological Deconstruction of the sentence "Go Green !" or the phrase ". . . go green . . ." ? & (2) What is one actually supposed to do to "go green" ?
Is it a hyped-up buzz-word/cliche devoid of meaning ? Are we currently in some other colour and we have to physically move to some green zone ?
I thought , maybe translating between languages will help. So I converted "go green" to French to get "mettre au vert" and back to English to get "go green". Now I converted "mettre au bleu" to get "put blue" and "mettre au rouge" to get "put red". It seems (from this very small inconclusive experiment) that the "go green" hype has entered French too, such that some colours "go", while other colours "put".
Best Answer
As mentioned in the comments, green is a modern metaphor for environmentally conscious.
go is being used per definition #4 in ODO:
although in this case whether it's considered "undesirable" likely depends on your political persuasion.
In recent years, I think this sense of go has become popular in pithy phrases, as in the aphorism Once you go black, you never go back (meaning that once a white person has had sex with a black person, they won't be satisfied with whites any more), although the rhyme probably also contributes to the popularity of this example.