All my life I’ve known the phrase little green men as a jocular description of extraterrestrials, but I never thought about where it came from; now Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org has done a Big List post about its fascinating history:
Before there were grays, reptilians, and other species of extraterrestrial beings that have visited earth in science fiction tales and in hallucinations, there were little green men. The phrase appears at the close of the nineteenth century but has its origins in older folklore about little people, a term for elves, fairies, and other mythical beings. […]
The phrase little people begins to be applied to fairies and the like in the eighteenth century. For instance, there is this published in the Delphick Oracle of 2 October 1719, although the little people here are humans of small stature whom the writer believes to be the origin of beliefs in fairies […] Poet George Waldron uses both little people and little men to denote the fairies believed by the locals to live on the Isle of Man. From his Description of the Isle of Man, written in 1726 and published posthumously in 1731 […] By the mid eighteenth century, such little people begin to be described as being clothed in green, and the phrase little green man starts to make its appearance. […]
The little green people move from being earthly spirits to extraterrestrial beings at the close of the century. Charles Battell Loomis’s children’s story the Green Boy from Harrah tells of the adventures an earth boy named Sandy has with an extraterrestrial visitor, printed in the Atlanta Constitution of 8 October 1899 […] And we get the phrase little green men used in reference to ETs in the Sunday Oregonian of 29 July 1906 […] Two years later, Ohio’s Columbus Evening Dispatch of 31 March 1908 printed this joke that shows that the phrase little green man had become widely understood as a reference to extraterrestrial beings:
The Martians were prepared to catch the first message from the earth.
“Let me see,” exclaimed the first little green man, “I wonder if the first communication will be a flash, a tick or a knock.”
“A knock, very likely,” laughed the second little green man. “You know the earth is just full of knockers.”
Which shows how wise the Martians really are.
Who knows what was denoted by “knockers” here? Green’s has a plethora of slang senses, and if you’re thinking about ‘boobs,’ that isn’t attested until considerably later (and would have been an unlikely referent in a 1908 newspaper anyway). At any rate, click through for more, including the quotations, which I have elided.
Jesse Sheidlower’s historical dictionary of science fiction has the same quote and glosses knocker as “a person who habitually criticizes”, which was my first thought and is a sense found in general dictionaries.
https://sfdictionary.com/view/304/little-green-man
A 21st-century extended sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men_(Russo-Ukrainian_war).
Although that first quote for the “breasts” sense of “knockers” is from circa 1930, it’s from the memoirs of Nell Kimball (1854–1934), which makes it somewhat plausible evidence of already-current sexual slang from her younger years as a working prostitute and then brothel-keeper. It’s not *impossible* that an elderly and long-retired alumna of the sex business would pick up new slang and anachronistically mix it into her reminiscences, but I’m not sure if that’s the smart way to bet here. I do give weight to hat’s “unlikely referent in a 1908 newspaper” point, though.
BTW, Green’s is such a spectacularly-useful resource (and clearly done for love of the subject rather than for filthy lucre) one hesitates to be critical, but it does seem useful to be aware of some of the limitations of its standard approach, one of which seems to be that under X it will include compounds (alphabetically adjacent) where X is the first element but will not include compounds where X is the second (or third etc.) component. So “knocker” leads you to various knocker-initial compounds, but does not cross-reference knocker-final compounds it has elsewhere like this bit of typically-offensive slang I recall hearing in my own adolescence. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/n52s6ey#zewvzpy
Further update: some assert that Nell Kimball, to whom I previously referred, was fictitious and her purported memoirs were in fact written by the over-half-century-younger Stephen Longstreet (1907-2002), although with considerable plagiarism from earlier works by Herbert Asbury (1891-1963). That may be relevant to how much authority should be given to apparently period language in period scenes.
Jesse Sheidlower’s historical dictionary of science fiction has the same quote and glosses knocker as “a person who habitually criticizes”, which was my first thought and is a sense found in general dictionaries.
Makes sense, but it would never have occurred to me!
Not so “little,” but … “Sociologically, the Tharks are an interesting study in contradictions. On the one hand, they, like all Greens, are warlike and cruel, and under the reign of Tal Hajus, there were serious considerations about the effectiveness of rape as a tactic for demoralizing female captives. On the other hand, they have a strong code of honor to which even Jeddaks must adhere.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tharks
John Carter was briefly a hero of mine in my sf-devouring youth.
I assume there is no connection with “fart-knocker”, which was often heard on Beavis and Butthead”. (My kids were teenagers then. I never watched it — oh no! Heaven forfend!)
I can’t find a simple explanation of what fartknocker is supposed to mean. Yeah, everybody remembers it was used by Beavis and Butthead. But is it a minced, elegant variant of fudge-packer ?
I heard “fark-nocker” in this skit, but never understood what it referred to.
Wiktionary calls it an example of a shitgibbon compound.
Y << Oh god, my kids and I loved Rap! We still listen to him, even now!
I always assumed a “fart-knocker” meant someone who farts a lot (he knocks out fart after fart, all day), but who knows? Rap is dead and gone, so we can’t ask him… 😢
Stu Clayton << Fart-knocker an “elegant” variety of “fudge packer”?? Aah-hahaha! [Falls off chair laughing.]
I would guess the oldest story of “green aliens” is the story of the green children of Woolpit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_children_of_Woolpit) which was first recorded in an annal in 1189. It’s the account (related as true) of two children with green skin and strange clothing who appear in a village and who, once they learn English, claim to have come from another very different land/world. I remember reading this story in the 1970s in one of those paperbacks with a title like “UFOs: the hidden truth”.
According to Wikipedia the story of the green children was rediscovered in the Victorian era when “faerie” was in vogue, so could plausibly have influenced the “green alien” trope.
Green-skinned photosynthetic human visitors from the future were a feature of one of Gene Wolfe’s fantasy universes. Green skin would certainly would make sense from a viewpoint of self-generated energy metabolism. And it’s a fair open question— when I was a grad student, a biologist in my dorm would wonder aloud about why animals had never evolved photosynthetic feathers (and then got very drunk, as grad students do). It would certainly explain why aliens could be green.
The rejuvenated earthling soldiers in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series are both green and photosynthetic.
The Woolpit children were apparently Welsh. After all, the girl, who was “very wanton and impudent”, claimed that they came from “a land where the sun never shone, and the light was like twilight”, and many of us are green, on account of the leeks.
Green skin would certainly would make sense from a viewpoint of self-generated energy metabolism.
Is there any other kind of metabolism ? Or are you thinking of self-sufficiency, the divine languor which requires no metabolic exertions at all ?
@Stu Clayton
I was thinking of this description of photosynthesis:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-early-step-on-the-long-strange-road-to-photosynthesis-20260610/
More properly a voyage from photonic to chemical energy.
@MattF: yes, metabolism is defined to be processes in an “organism” that convert one kind of energy into another kind. The output energy is self-generated in this sense. Not ex nihilo, but ex aliquo. No energy input, no energy output.
I had had the impression that by “self-generated energy metabolism” you were entertaining the idea that with photosynthetic skin nobody would want or need to order pizza any more, any more than trees do.
Why bother with your own chlorophyll when you can order an extra side of rocket with parmesan? That costs much less than millions of years of evolution.
I too find that Quanta is a good source of reliable info.
You’d need a lot of area to power a human, though.
Feathers wouldn’t work – they’re dead. Huge feathery external gills could work, except they’d dry out and die in air…
Nice. Links to the open-access paper and to the very simple explanation for why plants are green (and why purple sulfur bacteria are purple).
The Woolpit children were apparently Welsh
Indeed, that has been suggested by scholars. According to Wikipedia:
“ Medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen offers a different kind of historical explanation, arguing that the story is an oblique account of the racial difference between the English and the indigenous Britons.”
A less interesting explanation is that the children were Flemish.
“Knock” immediately made me think of a seance (“Knock, if there’s anyone there.”) and thus I thought “knocker” was a jocular reference to a medium, especially given the date of publication.
Photosynthetic human(oid)s are relatively common in science fiction. As MattF notes, there is the green guy who shows up in The Claw of the Conciliator to explain a little bit about time travel and to give Severian what seems to be a worthless* “mathematician’s answer” to another question. However, that guy does not photosynthesize natively. Instead, he has symbiotic algae that have been artificially implanted in his body—like lichens, or giant green anemones, or spotted salamander eggs. (In another vein, suffer fish and blue-ringed octopuses have bacterial endosymbionts that are actually responsible for producing those animals’ legendarily deadly tetrodotoxins.)
One of the main characters on Farscape, Zhaan was a humanoid, ambulatory, photosynthetic alien plant. (She was capable of achieving orgasms from exposure to bright light.) Unlike Earth plants, she was blue, rather than green, presumably because of a difference in spectral type between Sol and her home world sun. Unfortunately, the blue makeup caused medical problems for the actress, Virginia Hey,** who played Zhaan, and in the later seasons of the show she had only a handful of guest appearances.
* I first typed “useless” here, but I decided that was subtly wrong pragmatically, when used with “seems.” As “seems” implies, the answer the green oracle gives initially appears—to Severian and his reader—to be of no value, but that appearance is incorrect. However, since Severian ultimately does not get any use out of the information, it does end up being actually “useless” in a reasonable sense, even though it had the potential to be useful.
** She may be better known for touring as a backup singer for The Buggles.
Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog is a great place to read about stuff like the green children of Woolpit, since he always goes right to the sources, and he did a series on them. This post on why they were green answers the linguistic question: what color word did the near-contemporary sources use? They’re in Latin and it’s viridis in both; one also uses prasinus.
Heh. Heh heh.
(First I wanted to say that’s their True Name because they make you suffer if you eat them. Then I figured, it’s a nerve toxin, so they rather end your suffering, and I should wax lyrical about how philosophical this humble typo is. Alas, I’m too tired in this April weather to wax either lyrical or philosophical.)
That’s some synesthesia.
At some point in probably the late Seventies I read an SF paperback described here as an “attempt to imagine for the British what Verwoerd-style apartheid would be like if applied here, and people of Celtic origin had green skins.” https://www.peterdickinson.com/books/greengene/
Via Metafilter, of tangential interest, these mushrooms cause people to hallucinate little people (not necessarily green), and nobody understands the biochemistry of how they cause this effect, even after scientists have decoded the entire genome of the shrooms.
nobody understands the biochemistry of how they cause this effect, even after scientists have decoded the entire genome of the shrooms
Well, duh, because they have no database that would enable them to identify the intrusive LGM genes.
🙂
According to the article Martin linked, what scientists found about that mushroom’s genome is that it doesn’t code for the psychoactive ingredients in Psilocybe mushrooms or the fly amanita. Which doesn’t seem surprising, since little people aren’t overrepresented in the hallucinations the latter two produce. I’m told. The idea of such a specific hallucinogen is very interesting, though.
I want to know whether the Yunnan boletes are found up the airy mountain, or down the rushy glen.
it seems like a comparison to the various plant sources of DMT might be worthwhile, especially for understanding whether the widespread DMT “machine elves” (mckenna’s label; presumably there are older names in amazonian languages) are extraterrestrial or simply fae.
That’s a good start, but now they need to decode the entire biochemistry of the brain. That’s gonna take a while.
I want to know whether the Yunnan boletes are found up the airy mountain, or down the rushy glen.
I went mushroom picking in Yunnan once, and we certainly went up the airy mountain, not down the rushy glen, so that would be my bet. We didn’t find any of this particular variety, though, as far as I know (we were unsuccessfully looking for sōngróng 松茸 (matsutake), but only found varieties I didn’t know, so who knows – and we stopped worried about it after descending the airy mountain and buying some matsutake from someone who had been successful)
I love the fact that such a question can be answered hereabouts from personal experience.