cigarette is a nail in your coffin’ type. The journal Proverbium (1992) also suggests that ‘Cigarettes are coffin nails’ may have originated in Kentucky.
cold See AS COLD; IN THE.
cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey The derivation of this phrase meaning ‘extremely cold’ (known by 1835) may have nothing to do with any animal. A brass monkey was the name given to the plate on a warship’s deck on which cannon balls (or other ammunition) were stacked. In cold weather the brass would contract, tending to cause the stack to fall down. ‘Monkey’ appears to have been a common slang word in gunnery days (and not just at sea) – there was a type of gun or cannon known as a ‘monkey’ and a ‘powder monkey’ was the name for a boy who carried powder to the guns. Philip Holberton challenged this theory (1998): ‘Why would anyone use an expensive metal like brass on which to stack cannon balls? If the stack is going to collapse in cold weather, what will happen to it in a seaway? In pictures I have seen, the bottom row of a stack of cannon balls fitted into a wooden grid or a series of hollows like an old-fashioned egg-rack.’ Brian J. Goggin (1999) said no evidence had been found of the phrase in any nautical writings from the era of warships with cannon.
cold hands, warm heart A forgiving little phrase, for when having shaken hands and found the other person’s to be cold. A proverb first recorded in 1903 (CODP).
(to give someone the) cold shoulder Meaning, ‘to be studiedly indifferent towards someone’. Known by 1820, this expression is said to have originated with the medieval French custom of serving guests a hot roast. When they had outstayed their welcome, the host would pointedly produce a cold shoulder of mutton to get them on their way.
(a) cold war Any tension between powers, short of all-out war, but specifically that between the Soviet Union and the West following the Second World War. This latter use was popularized by Bernard Baruch, the US financier and presidential adviser, in a speech in South Carolina (16 April 1947): ‘Let us not be deceived – we are today in the midst of a cold war.’ The phrase was suggested to him by the speechwriter Herbert Bayard Swope, who had been using it privately since 1940.
collapse of stout party A catchphrase that might be used as the tag-line to a story about the humbling of a pompous person. It has long been associated with Punch and was thought to have occurred in the wordy captions given to that magazine’s cartoons. But as Ronald Pearsall explains in his book with the title Collapse of Stout Party (1975): ‘To many people Victorian wit and humour is summed up by Punch when every joke is supposed to end with “Collapse of Stout Party”, though this phrase tends to be as elusive as “Elementary, my dear Watson” in the Sherlock Holmes sagas.’ At least OED2 manages to find a reference to a ‘Stout Party’ in the caption to a cartoon in the edition of Punch dated 25 August 1855.
colour See ANY COLOUR.
(a/the) colour bar Name given to the divisions, legal and social, between white people and ‘people of colour’ in the first half of the 20th century. Known by 1913.
Columbus and the egg A reference to the anecdote of Christopher Columbus’s egg. Someone, jealous of his success, pointed out that if he had not discovered the New World someone else would have done so. Columbus did not reply directly but asked the other people present if they could make an egg stand on its end. When they failed, he broke the end of the egg and stood it up that way. The moral was plain: once he had shown the way, anyone could do it. From Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost, Chap. 1 (1934): ‘“Ah,” said Mr Potter, “remember Columbus and the egg. They could all make it stand up after he’d shown them how to crack it at one end. The secret was simple, you see, but Columbus thought of it first”.’
column See AGONY.
comb See FIGHT BETWEEN; FINE-TOOTH.
come See AND STILL THEY.
(to) come a cropper (or fall/get) To have a bad fall (physically) or, in a transferred sense, to run into major misfortune, particularly when things seem to be going well. Possibly from a horse-riding accident where the rider might fall with a crop (handle of a whip) in the hand. Also the phrase ‘neck and crop’ means ‘completely’. Known by the mid-19th century. R. S. Surtees, Ask Mamma, Chap. 53 (1858): ‘[He] rode at an impracticable fence, and got a cropper for his pains.’ Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875): ‘He would “be coming a cropper rather”, were he to marry Melmotte’s daughter for her money, and then find that she had got none.’
come again? ‘Repeat what you have just said, please!’ Usually uttered, not when the speaker has failed to hear the foregoing but cannot believe or understand it. British and American use by the 1930s, at least.
(the) comedy is ended The last words of François Rabelais (who died about 1550) are supposed to have been: ‘Tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée [bring down the curtain, the farce is played out].’ The attribution is made, hedged about with disclaimers, in Jean Fleury’s Rabelais et ses oeuvres (1877) and also in the edition of Rabelais by Motteux (1693). In Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time (1840), a character says: ‘Finita la commedia’. At the end of Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s opera Il Pagliacci [The Clowns] (1892), Canio exclaims: ‘La commedia è finita [the comedy is finished/over].’
come back, all is forgiven See WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
come hell and high water Meaning ‘come what may’, this phrase is mentioned in Partridge/Slang as a cliché but, as such phrases go, is curiously lacking in citations. OED2 finds no examples earlier than the 20th century. Come Hell or High Water was used as the title of a book by yachtswoman Clare Francis in 1977. She followed it in 1978 with Come Wind or Weather. Hell and High Water was the title of a US film in 1954. Graeme Donald in Today (26 April 1986) linked it to punishments meted out to witches in the Middle Ages: ‘Lesser transgressions only warranted the miscreant being obliged to stand in boiling water, the depth of which was directly proportional to the crime. Hence the expression “From Hell and high water, may the good Lord deliver us”.’ This is rather fanciful. Perhaps he was thinking of the so-called Thieves’ Litany from Hull, Hell and Halifax, good Lord deliver us (known by 1594, because the gibbet was much used in these places in the 16th and 17th centuries). ‘Charged him with caring only about conquering the Valley on 13,455ft Mount Kinabalu “come hell or high water”’ – Daily Record (21 September 1994); ‘The shares are then held, come hell or high water, for a year. Then the process is repeated and a new portfolio is bought’ – The Independent (1 April 1995).
come in, number—, your time is up! Mimicking the kind of thing the hirers of pleasure boats say, this is sometimes applied in other contexts to people who are overstaying their welcome. By the mid-20th century, at least.
come on down! In the American TV consumer game The Price is Right (from 1957), the host (Bill Cullen was the first) would appear to summon contestants from the studio audience by saying ‘[name], come on down!’ This procedure was reproduced when the quiz was broadcast on British ITV 1984 –8, with Leslie Crowther uttering the words.
comfortably See ARE YOU SITTING.
(to) come out fighting Not to take something lying down, responding to a challenge. Date of origin unknown. ‘We’ll get to the sea and we’re coming out fighting’ – film Retreat, Hell! (US 1952).
