cold meat cart
A darkly comic Victorian British slang term for a hearse — the vehicle that carries corpses to their final resting place.
Definitions
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.
The neighborhood kids used to dare each other to run alongside the cold meat cart as it rolled slowly down the street.
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(UK, slang, obsolete) A hearse.
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- cold meat box82%
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.
- cold meat box78%
(UK, slang, obsolete) A coffin.
- cold meat77%
(slang, uncountable) One or more corpses, or people soon to be killed.
- cold meat train73%
(UK, slang, obsolete, military) The last railway train of the night by which officers could reach Aldershot via the South Western Railway.