Ways of Saying It's Cold

Good and cold today, gang, a hard frost has gripped the Mid-Atlantic states. It's 27 degrees F. outside at 8:45 a.m., I can't say what it is inside but my feet are slowly going numb. The cat is scrunched up against the heater, and I may scrunch up there with him if this keeps up.   

I was just reading about a favorite cold-weather saying on an academic website (very rude and mostly not that funny, and the website's from 1998, which is graphically obvious) devoted to "vulgar comparative metaphors." The saying has to do with the décolletage of a witch. The one about the brass monkey is there too, although that one's not a comparative simile or metaphor, we're told. I'd call it hyperbole, myself, but I really don't know how brittle brass can get when it's cold.

The site says the witch comparison "endures year after year as the most popular VCM" and calls this inexplicable. But why? I love it. It's concise, visual, deeply incongruous, has a satisfying tang of the supernatural, and some nice plosives in the last word that add even more emphasis and finality. There are writers who try to bring the vigor of street language to their writing—David Mamet comes to mind—with elaborately invented VCMs where the thing is extended—"colder than a something something in a something something something" but I think this is overkill. What's that? You insist on, you positively must have, an example? Well, OK. Here's an exchange from Mamet's generally engaging movie Heist:

"I'll be quieter than an ant pissing on cotton."
"I want you quieter than an ant not even thinking about pissing on cotton."

I don't know, man. Maybe you think this is wonderful—I mean, David Mamet did—but I think it has a certain sophomoric pointlessness. "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter," is how Sam Spade put it. Maybe Mamet himself is ambivalent about this; later in the film the first speaker makes another vulgar comparison during a tense scene, and the second grabs a heavy pipe and raises it, preparatory to smashing the first guy's skull. "All right!" he roars. "You wanna play the dozens?" I'm wondering if Mamet is just getting tired of the way this character talks, you know?

Frankly, I think it's a mark of amateurishness to strive too hard for originality, especially when earthiness is really the effect you're after. Avoid clichés, by all means, but I think certain sayings are classics, like the navy blazer, because they just work. Let us be elegantly vulgar, not clumsy vulgarians.

I run the danger of preaching now, so finally, before the benediction, I'd like to leave you with one of the finest examples of describing winter in words—and actually one of the finest examples of describing anything—that you're ever going to read. It is, of course, Shakespeare's "When Icicles Hang by the Wall." Enjoy.