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Cool Card

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You are a cool card (or pretty cool card). A person who coolly asks for something preposterous or outrageous. Card = character, hence a queer card, a rum card, etc. And “cool” in this connection means coolly impudent.

⁂ Gifford says the phrase means a “cooling-card, or bolus”; but this is not likely, as a cool-card acts generally as an irritant. A person’s card of address is given at the door, and represents the person himself, and this without doubt is the card referred to.

“Youʹre a shaky old card; and you canʹt be in love with this Lizzie.”—Dickens Our Mutual Friend, book iii. chap. i. p. 192.

 

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.

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Conversation Sharp
Convey
Conveyers
Conway Cabal (The), 1777
Conyger or Conigry
Cooing and Billing
Cook your Goose
Cooked
Cooking
Cooks
Cool Card
Cool as a Cucumber
Cool Hundred (A)
Cool Tankard (A) or Cool Cup
Coon (A) means a racoon
Cooper
Cooper
Cooper
Cooper’s Hill
Coot
Cop (A)