Çolder than expressions
5 – Colder than a penguin’s tuxedo
These flightless birds mostly live in inhospitable cold environments in the Southern Hemisphere. Their feathers have a design that serves as useful camouflage when they are hunting for food. To human observers, this plumage looks somewhat comical, like the animals are wearing tuxedos. Not only do they live in the Antarctic, they also spend a lot of time in its freezing waters. Wearing a dripping-wet tuxedo at The South Pole is not a very exciting prospect at all!
6 – Colder than a polar bear’s toenails
The feet are one of the coolest parts of the body. When the weather is cold we always cover them up with socks and shoes to stay warm. Given that polar bears don’t do footwear, we can imagine they get very cold feet indeed. How would you feel walking around in snow and ice all day with bare feet? Just the thought of this brings shivers.
7 – Colder than a steel plate in Antarctica
Antarctica is the southernmost continent in the world. It is also the coldest and windiest place you can visit. This is a cold land of ice, frozen water covers 98% of it. With freezing winds of up to 200 miles per hour (320km), it is fair to say the chill factor is pretty high. Metal seems colder than the air around it when you touch it due to thermal conductivity. So a metallic plate in such an environment would feel very cold indeed!
8 – Colder than a toilet seat made of brass on the shady part of an iceberg
Another bathroom-themed expression, this crude humor seems to make them even funnier. Icebergs are gigantic chunks of frozen water that come from the coldest parts of oceans. They can float for decades but that doesn’t make them useful to build things on. The silly thought of a brass toilet drifting around on ice is quite amusing. This colder than saying seems to have come from the south of the USA.
9 – Colder than an Eskimo’s outhouse
Eskimos or Inuits, are indigenous people that live in the far north of our planet. They dwell in the far reaches of countries such as Alaska, Russia, Canada, and Greenland which are typically frozen for most of the year. Inuits are so familiar with the cold that some of them have up to 400 words for snow!
The people are famed for building igloos which are dome houses made from compacted snow. Outhouses are bathrooms detached from houses that nobody wants to run to on a cold winter’s evening. The idea of an igloo itself brings the feeling of being cold to the mind, once you add in an outside toilet it gets even more chilly.
10 – Colder than the hinges of hell
This one seems to have come from the idiom “hotter than the hinges of hell”. Hell is meant to be a smoldering burning eternity so the hotter than expression seems to make a lot more sense. It was probably adopted into a colder than expression just because hell is often used to describe anything extreme. You wouldn’t expect the hinges for the gates to hell to be frozen but it still makes for a good saying to describe something that is cold.
11 – Colder than the shady side of a banker’s heart
When it comes to finance, bankers are not exactly known for their compassion. In the world of trading and making money, empathy, and pity are not highly regarded as useful personality traits. Calculated, cold-hearted decisions are made which is why bankers are thought of this way. The shade is always a cooler place than in the sun and is used to make this colder than expression more potent.
12 – Colder than a grave digger’s shovel
Cemeteries are known as cold places. They bring thoughts of darkness and death which are also things associated with the cold. Grave diggers deal with the cold earth as they scoop it out to create holes for the dead to rest in. The metal shovel that they use for this, paints a chilly picture of the cold in our minds.
13 – Colder than skinny dipping in a snowstorm
Have you ever gone swimming without a bathing suit? It isn’t something most people would normally do in the cold. Imagine going for a dip when it is so bleak outside that snow is falling from the sky. Then throw in a storm with high winds to make it even more stinging. Brrrrrrrrrr!
14 – Colder than a reindeer’s antlers
The reindeer is another animal that thrives in a cold climate. When they aren’t pulling a sleigh for Santa, they live in the tundra in the Arctic and Subarctic regions. Most of their bodies are covered in fur to protect them from frosty temperatures although their antlers are not. This part of the creatures is no doubt one of the coldest.
Other colder than expressions
15 – Colder than a bucket of penguin poo
16 – Colder than a cast iron toilet
17 – Colder than a gold digger’s heart
18 – Colder than a landlord’s heart
19 – Colder than a mixture of acetone and dry ice
20 – Colder than a mortician’s mistress
21 – Colder than a penguin’s ankle socks
22 – Colder than a polar bear’s pajamas
23 – Colder than a room full of ex-wives
24 – Colder than a snowcone on the North Pole
25 – Colder than a tax collector’s heart
26 – Colder than a Tibetan tin toilet top
27 – Colder than a well digger’s butt
28 – Colder than a witch’s belt buckle
29 – Colder than in a freezer in Antarctica
30 – Colder than Jack Frost’s toes after he skates on an icy pond
31 – Colder than moonlight on a tombstone
32 – Colder than penguin snot
Ideas for teaching colder than expressions
It can be a fun activity to make up your own colder than expressions. By thinking of several cold things and adding them together you can easily create a hilarious way to say it is very cold.
For example, let’s think of a cold place, a cold object, and a cold food – the Antarctic, a snowman, and an ice cream. Join these words and we have – Colder than a snowman eating ice cream in the Antarctic.
Start out by asking your group to brainstorm and make a list of things that are cold. Once this has been compiled, it is easy to mix and match the things and places from there to make new funny sayings.
