A carefree time of youthful innocence, ingenuousness, and inexperience. A variant of the more common "salad days," which itself is taken from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. I had a few encounters with truly romantic love back in my salad years, before I graduated; now, however, I think love is largely an elaborate delusion. Whenever I ask my grandfather the meaning of a word I hear on TV, he always laughs and says he'll tell me when I'm no longer in my salad years.