Green bananas

Today during our graduation party, I was chatting with our M.A. students from China. The question of anxiety came up — anxiety about getting a job and / or keeping one. I said, yes, I noticed that some of your classmates are worrywarts, and told them that we have many other colloquial words for such folk (fussbudgets, fussbuttons, nervous nellies, and so on) in English. They were fascinated by these quixotic terms, so I asked them if they had any similar words in Chinese. Since they couldn't readily offer any, I invented one on the spot: zhāojíguǐ 著急鬼 (lit., "anxious ghost"). Of course, we all knew that wasn't an authentic sinicism, and I myself wasn't satisfied with it, so I pushed them a little harder: "Are you sure you don't have such term in your online messaging and the like?" Finally, one of them volunteered that she uses "green banana" in the same sense as "worrywart", and several others chimed in that they did too. In China, "green bananas" have recently become a viral…