I'm sure it was often used, but I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the non-English-speaking country where my father worked for many years. So "green-bar paper" is not the only apparently-commonly-used English term that I had to learn later in life, since when I was growing up, I heard English mostly from my parents and coworkers, and that's not a term that they happened to use a lot. So although it's my native tongue, I'm constantly finding holes in my vocabulary — usually 80's or 90's slang terms that my (extensive) reading habit couldn't teach me because most of the English-language books I had access to in the 80's or 90's were published in the 1970's or earlier.
In other words, don't take my not knowing a term as evidence that it wasn't commonly used; my childhood was unusual by the standards of most Americans. :-)
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I'm sure it was often used, but I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the non-English-speaking country where my father worked for many years. So "green-bar paper" is not the only apparently-commonly-used English term that I had to learn later in life, since when I was growing up, I heard English mostly from my parents and coworkers, and that's not a term that they happened to use a lot. So although it's my native tongue, I'm constantly finding holes in my vocabulary — usually 80's or 90's slang terms that my (extensive) reading habit couldn't teach me because most of the English-language books I had access to in the 80's or 90's were published in the 1970's or earlier.
In other words, don't take my not knowing a term as evidence that it wasn't commonly used; my childhood was unusual by the standards of most Americans. :-)