Meaning
Consolation that hardly helps; slight or unwelcome encouragement offered in the face of misfortune, typically because it changes nothing about the loss ('the apology came late, and it was cold comfort'). It is usually predicative or the object of 'be', 'give' or 'offer', and is often tinged with irony. Slightly formal or literary in flavour, and very frequently ironic. Regional use: General English.
Origin
One of the oldest expressions of this group. Word Histories traces the collocation to the late-fourteenth-century alliterative poem Patience, a retelling of the Book of Jonah: 'Lorde, colde watz his cumfort, & his care huge'. The Phrase Finder likewise cites a fourteenth-century alliterative poem and notes later use by Chaucer and by Shakespeare, who plays on the phrase in King John ('I must beg cold comfort') and The Taming of the Shrew. Here 'cold' carries its old sense of chilling, damping and discouraging, an epithet Middle English regularly attached to counsel, news and comfort alike; Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale already treats advice as 'colde'. The phrase's extra familiarity in modern Britain owes something to Stella Gibbons's 1932 comic novel Cold Comfort Farm, which parodied rural melodrama. No dispute attaches to the origin; it is a medieval metaphor that never dropped out of use.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- poor comfort
- small comfort
Usage Examples
- Knowing the delay had affected every runner was cold comfort to someone who had trained all year.
- The generous refund policy is cold comfort when the workshop you wanted is already full.
- It is cold comfort to be told the fault is rare when yours is the faulty unit.