cold

   1. dead

   Usually but not exclusively used of hotblooded creatures, although knocked out cold refers to unconsciousness only. Whence several morbidly humorous 19th-century phrases, of which the most common was cold meat, a corpse:

    If you bother with us, I will make meat of you — cold meat. (F. Harris, 1925)

   A cold-meat party was a funeral; a cold-box a coffin: a cold cart a hearse; a cold cook an undertaker; and cold storage the grave.

   2. not easily susceptible to sexual excitement

   The opposite of hot¹ but also of someone who fails to be sexually excited on a specific occasion:

    I have often been asked why on my African travels I was cold in regard to the native women. (F. Harris, 1925 — what strange interlocutors he must have met)

   Despite Mr Harris's unwonted abstinence, more of women than of men, as in Shakespeare's cold chastity.

   3. an excuse for an ailment which is taboo or concealed

   Servicemen in the Second World War who contracted gonorrhoea might say that they had a cold. Now used by politicians who wish to conceal infirmity:

    Andropov spent half his 15 months in power seriously ill, supposedly suffering from a 'cold' but in fact lying in a Kremlin hospital hitched up to a dialysis machine with kidney failure and diabetes. {Sunday Telegraph, 27 March 1994)

   See also catch a cold^1,2 and diplomatic cold.