Stop Saying ‘It’s Cold’ — Say This Instead

It’s easy to break the ice with a conversation about the weather, but when it’s truly icy outside, saying, “It’s cold,” or “It’s snowing,” can make a gray day feel even more blah. There are far more creative ways to express yourself or your feelings about the freezing temps. Rain, snow, and wind have long inspired writers to come up with colorful phrasing, and regional differences in weather give us specific slang to refer to chilly conditions. Take a look at some of these delightfully descriptive ways to express your thoughts about winter.  

You might hear someone say, “It’s cold enough to freeze the tail/nose off a brass monkey.” Calling frigid temps “brass monkey weather” dates back to an 1838 edition of the The New York Herald. The phrasing likely came about from the popularity of souvenir brass monkeys from travel to Asian countries. You might hear the phrasing in the U.S., but it’s most popular in New Zealand. 

In New York City, it’s not just cold — it’s brick. Though it’s difficult to pin down the exact origin of this term, the streets full of brick buildings could be part of it — just imagine touching a brick wall in the middle of winter. A New Yorker might say it’s “mad brick” or “brick as hell” to mean that it’s very cold. 

Though mention of a pharaoh calls up the hot deserts of Egypt, here it refers to an emotional coldness. The idiom is squarely American, arising in the early 1800s in U.S. newspapers. It can be traced back to the story of the first Passover, when the pharaoh’s heart was hardened against the Jewish people in Egypt. Saying it’s as cold as a pharaoh’s heart refers to a particularly unforgiving cold snap of weather.

If you’re from northern England or Scotland, “nithered” doesn’t just mean “cold”; it refers to being wet, shriveled up, and generally uncomfortable. It’s the perfect term for how you feel on a very wet winter day when you can’t stop the rain from soaking your bones. 

Potatoes past their eating date may not seem relevant to the concept of cold weather, but the expression “taters in the mould” has a classic London origin: Cockney rhyming slang. The final word of the phrase usually rhymes with the word it’s supposed to replace, so “taters in the mould” means “it’s cold.” You can also just say “it’s taters” when you’re in a rush to get out of the cold. 

This phrasing refers to polar bears, whose natural habitat is the frigid Arctic. Anything that’s cold enough for them is probably uncomfortably cold for humans.