ice [OE] The primary purpose of breaking the ice was to allow access to or the passage of boats through frozen water, but by the middle of the 16th century people were using the phrase to mean ‘to begin an undertaking’, ‘broach a difficult subject’. Ice has represented a person’s cold nature or unfriendly manner since at least the time of Shakespeare. Icy in a literal sense is Old English and has been used to describe someone’s behaviour since the mid 16th century. In the world of American slang diamonds have been ice since the late 19th century, and crystal meth since the late 20th. Ice cream has been around longer than you might think. The term first appeared in the late 17th century and had been shortened to ice by the mid 18th century. People have been icing food with sugar since before 1600, although as a noun icing has not been recorded before the late 17th century. The American equivalent is frosting [M18th]. The idea behind both is that the white sugar looks like ice. The phrase the icing on the cake, ‘an attractive but inessential addition or enhancement’, has been recorded since the 11890s.