What Do Cold Feet Have to Do With Bailing on A Wedding?
If you’ve got any friends who are particularly lily-livered, you might have leveled an accusation against them of having “cold feet.” It’s a phrase that’s used to imply that someone’s too nervous to do something. But there’s one particular usage that seems to be the most common: bailing on a wedding.
In that context, it’s one of those idioms that seems to make natural sense until you start to dissect it. It’s not like “cold” and nervous are miles apart, with sayings like “blood ran cold” or “chill down the spine” also in the realm of fear. (Weirdly, “in cold blood” means without any nerves or emotion at all, but we’ll ignore that one for a minute.) “Blood ran cold” and a “chill down the spine” are also both, if not exactly scientifically solid, a real sensation that happens.
Don't Miss
On the flip side, I can’t think of a single time that I ever felt panic from the ground up, or any kind of opinion emanating from my feet.
As with many slightly off-kilter sayings, “having cold feet” relies heavily on seniority, seniority that “cold feet” can easily claim. The history goes all the way back to an utterance in an Italian play named Volpone from 1605, where a character says: “Let me tell you, I am not, as your Lombard proverb saith, cold on my feet; or content to part with my commodities at a cheaper rate, than I accustomed: look not for it.”
The meaning is that the person in question is financially comfortable, which does make a certain sort of sense, as the ownership or lack of shoes is definitely a common connection to someone’s financial status. Imagine a pauper — it’s almost guaranteed they’ve got their tootsies out in open air. There’s also an interesting detail here in that they refer to it as a their “Lombard proverb,” insinuating that even then, it was already a known proverb, one of the Lombards’, a Germanic tribe that invaded Italy, which I suppose is how they ended up in their plays.
And sure enough, we do find a phrase related to cold feet in Germany. In 1862, in a German novel, it's a card-player who gets cold feet, or kalte fube bekommen. Of course, there might not be a single bigger intersection between money and nerves than a card table. Though not definite, it feels like this might be where it starts to move into the realm of courage, since the card player is indeed too nervous to continue playing, because of the risk of financial misfortune.
Even more germane (though not German), it's used in an 1896 book called Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in pretty much its modern meaning, minus the wedding environment: “I knew this was the way it would be. They got cold feet.”
It was also apparently an insult thrown at people who weren’t all too keen to fight in World War I. It seems like this all might be a fair bet for how cold feet became shorthand for chickening out.
As for how weddings became part of the equation, well, that part is easy: Such a nerve-racking decision and commitment can cool even the warmest of feet.
