• Listen

  What it means

  Literally “to play at green.” Means to play dumb, to feign ignorance or naivety — to pretend you don’t understand something when you clearly do.

  Vocabulary

  • grać — to play
  • zielone — green (neuter adjective used as noun)

  Grammar note

  'W zielone' uses the accusative after 'w'. 'Zielone' is a substantivised adjective — playing 'the green game', i.e. the naive innocent.

  Cultural context

  The origin may relate to card games or folk games. Today it's used to call out someone who is pretending not to know what's going on.

  Intermediate

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