Should I get in a lather - I think this is wrong...

[ImSoNotTelling]

My dad always tells me off for using jealous when I mean envious and vice versa. However my brain won't retain the difference.

Today DD got a bookstart bag from nursery, it includes a book called "colour me happy". One of the pictures is of the protagonist (a cat) holding a small ice cream and looking in an annoyed fashion at a monkey who has a much larger ice cream. The line is "when I'm jealous, colour me green".

This is wrong isn't it? Please advise, so that I know whether I can get all steamed up about it, it being a book provided by the govt n all...

You're right - it should be "envious" in that situation. The cat envies the monkey's ice-cream.

Ha! Right.

Now what would a true pedant do when confronted with this? Cross it out? It is going to irritate me...

Tricky one - in my case, I think the horror of marking books would outweigh the horror of the mistake

I'd probably tell the nursery staff. But they'd probably look back with that blank "Oh god, it's a crazy lady, don't enrage her" expression.

So if the cat had no ice cream at all then it would be jealous?

The experience of jealousy involves:

Fear of loss
Suspicion or anger about betrayal
Low self-esteem and sadness over loss
Uncertainty and loneliness
Fear of losing an important person to an attractive other
Distrust

The experience of envy involves:

Feelings of inferiority
Longing
Resentment of circumstances
Ill will towards envied person often accompanied by guilt about these feelings
Motivation to improve
Desire to possess the attractive rival's qualities
Disapproval of feelings

actually, apart from the envious/jealous arguemtn, i would ban that book because "colour me anything does not make any sense.
At all.

oh, i did not just mistype argument in pedants' corner.

As a rule of thumb, envy is about wanting what someone else has. Jealousy is worrying that you'll lose something or more often someone you care about to someone else.

The cat might conceivably feel jealous if his girlfriend had bought the icecreams for both him and the monkey, and he was worrying that she fancied the monkey because she got him the larger icecream.

Further details then.

The monkey is up a tree. It is being cheerfully watched by a snake and a bird. Some of the monkey's ice cream is dripping down and another bird is eating it. Some ladybirds are milling about on a nearby plant. The cat's teddy bear is propped up against a plant but I have no reason to believe from other scenes in the book that the bear is animate.

The whole scene is suffused with a green hue.

I am struggling to see how the scene could represent jealousy, but am open to ideas

Could it be that the cat is hopelessly in love with the monkey's partner (not shown) and is, actually, jealous?

The ice cream is a red herring.

Yeeeees I can see that Katisha. Unfotunately the monkey doesn't appear on any other pages so I am unable to ascertain if it is married/has a significant other.

The mental image of a dead herring sticking out of the top of an ice cream cone will haunt me for the rest of my days.