cold meat box
Victorian-era British slang for a coffin, playing on the grim logic that a coffin is, in the most literal sense, a box for cold meat.
Definitions
Victorian-era British slang for a coffin, playing on the grim logic that a coffin is, in the most literal sense, a box for cold meat. The phrase belongs to the dark, unsentimental vocabulary of 19th century street and working-class slang, where death was a frequent enough presence that blunt humor was a coping mechanism. 'Cold-meat box' has the same deadpan morbidity as other period euphemisms for coffins, and it shows up in penny dreadfuls and historical crime writing.
The undertaker measured him up with professional calm and muttered something about needing a wider cold-meat box than usual.
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(UK, slang, obsolete) A coffin.
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- cold meat cart82%
A darkly comic Victorian British slang term for a hearse — the vehicle that carries corpses to their final resting place. The humor is characteristically morbid: a corpse is 'cold meat,' and the cart that transports it is simply a delivery vehicle for the deceased. This kind of gallows humor was common in 19th-century slang, which rarely let death pass without a wry remark.
- cold cook74%
Old British slang for an undertaker or funeral director. The dark humor of the term is hard to miss — a 'cold cook' prepares bodies that are already cold rather than food. It's the kind of grim, wry nickname that working-class British slang excelled at producing. While largely dated now, it's the sort of phrase you'd encounter in Victorian-era texts, old crime fiction, or historical slang dictionaries.
- cold meat cart73%
(UK, slang, obsolete) A hearse.
- cold meat71%
(slang, uncountable) One or more corpses, or people soon to be killed.