cold feet

noun

Great agitation and anxiety caused by the expectation or the realization of danger: affright, alarm, apprehension, dread, fear, fearfulness, fright, funk, horror, panic, terror, trepidation. Idioms: fear and trembling. See fear/courage.

At some time between the 1893 first edition and the 1896 second edition of his novel Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane added the earliest known instance of cold feet: "I knew this is the way it would be. They got cold feet."

The new slang term, referring to loss of courage or enthusiasm, appears also in George Ade's Artie, another novel of 1896: "'I see. He turned out to be a boodler [corrupt politician], eh?' 'I don't see no way o' gettin' past it. I like Jimmy. He's one o' them boys that never has cold feet and there's nothin' too good for a friend, but by gee, I guess when it comes to doin' the nice, genteel dip he belongs with the smoothest of 'em. And he learned it so quick, too. Ooh!'"

By the turn of the century, college students were getting cold feet too. A glossary of college terms published in 1901 includes this definition from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York: "'To get cold-feet in a subject,' abandon it for weariness."

In the West in the twentieth century it has also been possible to call a person cold-footed, as in an example from New Mexico, "you are cold-footed on this proposition of marriage." The term was noted by Elsie Warnock in her rhetoric classes in 1914-17 when she asked them to list twenty disparaging terms used in everyday speech.

An echo of cold-footed comes from a book with a Texas setting in 1920: "We were not allowed to cross the cattle on the bridge, so we had to swim for it. Two of my men stayed with me, and the third, a 'cold-footer,' crossed on the bridge."

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: timidity that prevents the continuation of a course of action

Cold feet may be:

• Cold feet (metaphor), meaning misgivings about a previous, but unimplemented, decision
• Project COLDFEET, A CIA operation in 1962.
• Cold Feet, UK television series
• Cold Feet, the US version of the UK series
• Cold Feet (1984 film), a comedy film starring Griffin Dunne
• Cold Feet (1989 film), a comedy film starring Keith Carradine
• Cold Feet (1999 film), a drama film starring Chenoa Maxwell

Conditions in which coldness of feet is a cause or symptom:

• Chilblain
• Cryopedis, aka Durham's Foot
• Immersion foot, aka trench foot
• Frostbite
• Hypothyroidism
• Peripheral neuropathy
• Peripheral artery occlusive disease, aka peripheral vascular disease
• Raynaud's phenomenon
  • Raynaud's disease

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