leave someone out in the cold

English

WOTD – 31 January 2020

Etymology

A reference to someone being left outdoors in cold, wintry weather instead of being invited indoors where it is warm and comfortable.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈliːv ˌsʌmwʌn aʊt ɪn ðə ˈkɔʊld/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈliv ˌsʌmwʌn aʊt ən ðə ˈkoʊld/

• Audio (AU)

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• Hyphenation: leave some‧one out in the cold

Verb

leave someone out in the cold (third-person singular simple present leaves someone out in the cold, present participle leaving someone out in the cold, simple past and past participle left someone out in the cold)

1. (idiomatic) To deliberately fail to provide someone with support; to ignore or neglect.
   • 1902, Laurence Housman, “[Appendix: What is a Fairy Tale?] ‘Introduction’ to Gammer Grethel’s Fairy Tales”, in Michael Newton, editor, Victorian Fairy Tales (Oxford World’s Classics), Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, published 2015, →ISBN, page 401; 1st paperback edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2016, →ISBN:

     I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write this is a horse under what I foolishly meant for one. Any key to a work of imagination would be nearly, if not quite, as absurd. The tale is there, not to hide, but to show: if it show nothing at your window, do not open your door to it; leave it out in the cold.

   • 1906, A[dolphus] W[illiam] Ward, “Wallenstein and Bernard of Weimar”, in A. W. Ward, G[eorge] W[alter] Prothero, Stanley Leathes, editors, The Cambridge Modern History, volume IV (The Thirty Years’ War), Cambridge: At the University Press, →OCLC, section 1 (Wallenstein’s End (1632–4)), page 234:

     There was as yet no question of his [Albrecht von Wallenstein's] abandoning the Emperor [Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor], but he obviously meant to leave both Saxony and Bavaria out in the cold.

   • 1935 June, Hays Jones, Seamen and Longshoremen under the Red Flag (In a Soviet America), New York, N.Y.: Workers Library Publishers, →OCLC; republished in Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Seventy-sixth Congress, First Session on H. Res. 282 […], volume 11, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 3 November 1939 (published 1940), →OCLC, page 6797:

     He [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] promised unemployment insurance—he give^{[sic – meaning gives]} us the Wagner-Lewis bill which leaves entirely out in the cold the 17 million now unemployed.

   • 1950 January, Cecil J. Allen, “British Locomotive Practice and Performance”, in Railway Magazine, pages 12–13:

     While at first in the U.S.A. it may have been a matter of high-pressure salesmanship—and it has undoubtely been the irresistible enterprise of the General Motors Corporation, through its Electro-Motive subsidiary, that has set in motion this amazingly rapid transformation of American railway motive power, and has caused all the steam locomotive builders in the U.S.A. to follow suit or be left out in the cold—it seems now beyond dispute that, so far as the U.S.A. is concerned, the economics of the power question can be solved no other way.

   • 2000, Gio Batta Gori, “Cigarettes at the Third Millennium”, in Virtually Safe Cigarettes: Reviving an Opportunity Once Tragically Rejected, Amsterdam: IOS Press, →ISBN, pages 16–17:

     Although the settlement used the arguments of antismokers as a background, antismokers themselves were marginalized on account of their own long-standing prohibitionist policies. [...] Short of leaving themselves out in the cold and irrelevant, antismokers had no choice but to join as the lesser partners at the settlement table.

   • 2010, Carol Phillip-Tudor, The Boy, the Professor, and Ella’s Regret, Pittsburgh, Pa.: RoseDog Books, →ISBN, page 235:

     [H]e might have been looking for an excuse to cover his ass and leave the boy out in the cold.

   • 2011, Patricia Reed, chapter 3, in The House in the Curve: The Portrait, [Bloomington, Ind.]: Xlibris, →ISBN, pages 28–29:

     To make a long story short, I got them together and left myself out in the cold. That became the beginning of a long and painful relationship between Billy and me.

   • 2014, Lucy Diamond [pseudonym; Sue Mongredien], One Night in Italy, London: Pan Books, →ISBN; republished London: Pan Books, 2016, →ISBN, page 44:

     And there it was, the old power-dynamic reasserting itself: Mum siding physically with Dad, ganging up and leaving her out in the cold.

   • 2018 July 25, A. A. Dowd, “Fallout may be the Most Breathlessly Intense Mission: Impossible Adventure Yet”, in The A.V. Club‎^[1], archived from the original on 31 July 2018:

     For a while, the biggest question mark of allegiance is August Walker (Henry Cavill, subverting his man-of-steel screen presence), the brutish CIA tagalong feeding his superiors the theory that [Ethan] Hunt may really be going rogue after years of being left out in the cold by his handlers.

Translations

to deliberately fail to provide someone with support — see also ignore,‎ neglect

• Finnish: jättää heitteille

See also

• come in from the cold

Further reading

• “to leave out in the cold, phrase” under “cold, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, December 2012.
• “out in the cold, phrase”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.