cold, dead hands
- idiom
- Informal
:
de mis manos frías y muertas
- They will take their secrets to the grave or keep them with cold, dead hands.
Examples
-
He clung to his beliefs with cold, dead hands, refusing to compromise.
-
You'll have to pry this trophy from my cold, dead hands.
-
He will keep his job until they pry it from his cold, dead hands!
-
I won't let go of my family's traditions without a fight; they'll have to take them from my cold, dead hands!
-
You can have my vintage car when they pry it from my cold, dead hands!
-
She insists that they can take her family heirlooms only if they remove them from her cold, dead hands.
-
My grandfather always said he would never sell his collection of stamps until they took them from his cold, dead hands.
Surface Forms
Morphology
cold, + dead + hands
The literal meanings of 'cold', 'dead' and 'hands' make it clear to a learner that the phrase refers to the hands of a dead person, so part of the sense (death/possession) is recoverable from the constituents. However, the emphatic idiomatic force — that someone will not relinquish something except by dying (e.g. 'you'll have to take it from my cold, dead hands') — depends on cultural/pragmatic knowledge of the set phrase and is not fully predictable from the words alone.
Etymology
Cold, dead hands comes from the image of someone holding an object so tightly that only 'cold, dead' hands would let it go. So, it means 'will not give something up, no matter what'.
