cold comfort

cold comfort

Something that has failed as an intended source of solace. The news that I got a meager raise is cold comfort after not getting that big promotion. The fact that it's "stage one" is cold comfort to me—it's still cancer!
See also: cold, comfort
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

cold comfort

no comfort or consolation at all. She knows there are others worse off than her, but that's cold comfort. It was cold comfort to the student that others had failed as he had done.
See also: cold, comfort
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.

cold comfort

Slight or no consolation. For example, He can't lend us his canoe but will tell us where to rent one-that's cold comfort. The adjective cold was being applied to comfort in this sense by the early 1300s, and Shakespeare used the idiom numerous times.
See also: cold, comfort
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.

cold comfort

COMMON If a fact or statement is cold comfort to someone in a difficult situation, it does not make them feel less worried or sad. `Three years in higher education is a good investment for the future,' he says. But that is cold comfort to graduates who have worked so hard to get a degree, and now find themselves unemployed.
See also: cold, comfort
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed.

cold comfort

poor or inadequate consolation.
This expression, together with the previous idiom, reflects a traditional view that charity is often given in a perfunctory or uncaring way. The words cold (as the opposite of ‘encouraging’) and comfort have been associated since the early 14th century, but perhaps the phrase is most memorably linked for modern readers with the title of Stella Gibbons 's 1933 parody of sentimental novels of rural life, Cold Comfort Farm.
See also: cold, comfort
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary

ˌcold ˈcomfort

a thing that is intended to make you feel better but which does not: When you’ve just had your car stolen, it’s cold comfort to be told it happens to somebody every day.
See also: cold, comfort
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary

cold comfort

That’s little or no consolation. “Colde watz his cumfort,” reads a poem of unknown authorship written about 1325. The alliterative phrase appealed to Shakespeare, who used it a number of times (in King John, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew). It acquired cliché status by about 1800. Stella Gibbons used it in the title of her humorous book Cold Comfort Farm (1932).
See also: cold, comfort
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer

cold comfort

Offering limited sympathy or encouragement. People who lost their jobs during the recession would likely take cold comfort from economic reports that an upturn was likely to occur in the future. Shakespeare used the phrase in King John: “I do not ask you much, I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait / And so ingrateful, you deny me that.”
See also: cold, comfort
Endangered Phrases by Steven D. Price
See also:
  • be cold comfort
  • solace
  • take solace
  • take solace in (something)
  • widow's cruse
  • a widow's cruse
  • cruse
  • on the back of a postage stamp
  • comfort station
  • be there (for one)
References in periodicals archive
Cold Comfort: The Craft Sublime used these concepts of the 'island' to explore newly charted terrain in the field of contemporary New Zealand art.
Cold Comfort: The Craft Sublime
In "Cold Comfort," one of the album's best in terms of the lyrics and the singing, Kemp sings ruefully about a no-strings relationship with a passing-through lover: "It's a cold sorta comfort lying in your arms."
Kemp's CD may bring on a chill
Aunt Ada Doom gloomily warned of 'something nasty in the woodshed' in the satirical novel Cold Comfort Farm .
National shedquarters
The Journal's Cold Comfort campaign aims to tackle the problem of pensioners who are freezing in their own homes.
Help with heating
The allocation of liabilities is cold comfort if the seller goes belly up after the transaction and cannot meet the obligations of the agreement.
Avoiding the pitfalls in purchasing SNFs: some daunting challenges for nursing homes have made this a buyer's market but a poorly crafted purchase agreement can only add to the difficulties
That's cold comfort for a world full of industries and automobiles that spew a seemingly ever-increasing amount of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
Solving hazy mysteries: new research plumbs the chemical evolution and climatic effect of aerosols
Such a suggestion may be cold comfort to Farnsworth and Brown, but it's positively frightening to RCA and Alcatel.
The Secret History of Television: corporate power, patent law, and lone inventors. (Culture & Reviews)
Twenty-five years after Anita Bryant's successful campaign to thwart gay rights in Miami-Dade, perhaps there's cold comfort in the fact that her successors must resort to fraud to get signatures on their petitions-only to fail at the polls.
25 AB (After Bryant). (BTW)
At least Enron stakeholders have the cold comfort of congressional hearings and public indignation.
The Enrons of Russia. (Market Horizons)
That figure, of course, is cold comfort to any victim of an unsolved crime - and the police themselves will readily admit there are still too many of those about.
We must fight complacency; ECHO COMMENT
Neither of those crashes was my fault, but that would have been cold comfort in the grave.
Something Soft Between You And Death
Schlesinger has also ventured into top-tier television, including the ground-breaking An Englishman Abroad, a true story about gay spy Guy Burgess, and the warm, quirky, and pansexual comedy Cold Comfort Farm, a British TV film released theatrically in the United States.
A LIFE ON THE EDGE
"Cold Comfort Farm" is a highly diverting lesson in what a young woman can accomplish on the strength of supreme self-confidence.
Cold Comfort Farm
Welskopp's comparison is cold comfort for all those historians who have argued that the labor relations in the industry were characterised by a constant and linear process of de-skilling.
Arbeit und Macht im Huttenwerk: Arbeits-und industrielle Beziehungen in der deutschen und amerikanischen Eisen-und Stahlindustrie von den 1860er bis zu den 1930er Jahren
Cold Comfort Farm Comic novel by STELLA GIBBONS , published in 1932, a successful parody of regional and rural fiction by such early 20th-century English writers as Mary Webb and D.H.
Cold Comfort Farm