A darkly comic Victorian British slang term for a hearse — the vehicle that carries corpses to their final resting place.
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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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.
(UK, slang, obsolete) A coffin.
(slang, uncountable) One or more corpses, or people soon to be killed.
(UK, slang, obsolete, military) The last railway train of the night by which officers could reach Aldershot via the South Western Railway.
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(UK, slang, obsolete) A hearse.
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