cold [OE] Cold goes back to an ancient root that was shared by Latin gelu ‘frost’, the root of congeal [LME], *jelly, and *cool. It appears in many common expressions, a number of which refer to parts of the body. If someone gives you the cold shoulder [E19th] they are deliberately unfriendly. It is unlikely to be from ‘a cold shoulder of mutton’, for an unappetizing meal served to an unwelcome guest as is often claimed, but rather from a dismissive gesture of the body, involving a jerk or shrug of the shoulder. Cold-hearted first appeared in Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra. The proverb cold hands, warm heart is much more recent: the earliest example is from the late 19th century.

The origin of cold comfort [LME], meaning ‘poor or inadequate consolation’, is the idea that charity is often given in a cold or uncaring way. To go cold turkey is suddenly to give up taking a drug that you are addicted to, which can be an unpleasant process involving bouts of shivering and sweating that cause goose pimples reminiscent of the flesh of a dead plucked turkey. The expression dates from the 1920s. The Cold War was the state of political hostility that existed between the Soviet countries and Western powers from 1945 to 1990 although the term has been recorded from the beginning of the Second World War.