Idiom problem: "subject cold"

L

Lê Bá Việt
(lebaviet)

New Member
I'm having a problem with the phrase "subject cold". Please read the text in these four links:

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:...Apr01/0995.html+"know+his+subject+cold"&hl=vi
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:...Feb00/0137.html+"know+his+subject+cold"&hl=vi
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:...says/irvine.txt+"know+his+subject+cold"&hl=vi
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cach...html?t=printable+"know+my+subject+cold"&hl=vi

As you can see, "subject cold" relates to "professor", "teacher", "lecturer", "speech", etc. So... can anyone show me its meaning? :| Thanks a lot! :D
 
Maybe it means the subject that one professor (or teacher) majors in and is good at.
Hmm, perhaps we call " môn sở trường" in Vietnamese:D
 
In the text, the phrase is "know his subject cold", not just "subject cold". I think in "know his subject cold", the meaning is much clearer :D
 
I couldn't agree more with Vu. It seems to be quite clear in meaning with "know his subject cold".
 
Thank Vũ, Lan, and Hiếu for helping me. :) This is an excerpt from the short story "The German Refugee" that I have to translate into Vietnamese:

Neither of us said much about the lecture he had to give early in the October, and I kept my fingers crossed. It was somehow to come out of what we were doing daily, I think I felt, but exactly how, I had no idea; and to tell the truth, thought I didn’t say so to Oskar, the lecture frightened me. That and the ten more to follow during the fall term. Later, when I learned that he had been attemping with the help of the dictionary, to write in english and had produced “a complete disaster”, I suggested maybe he ought to stick to German and we could afterwards both try to put it into passable English. I was cheating when I said that because my German is eager, enough to read simple stuff but certainly not good enough for serious translation. He sweated with it, but no matter what language he tried, though he had been a professional writer for a generation and knew his subject cold, the lecture refused to move past page one.
Nhấn để mở rộng...

Everything is OK to me except the last sentence with the phrase "knew his subject cold". I have searched for more texts which contain that phrase so that I can guess its meaning. The Google has only showed accurate results with two keywords: "know his subject cold" and "know my subject cold", not with "subject cold". Therefore, I think the phrase is in the form of "know one's subject cold". I have asked many friends about it, but.... hix.... no answer seems to be suitable :|
 
Chỉnh sửa lần cuối:
From what I understand of the excerpt you provided, to "know one's subject cold" means to be adept in a particular field. This meaning fits perfectly well with the context provided in your excerpt.

Apparently, the narrator, "I", and Oskar, his German refugee, I supposed, are working on a lecture, which Oskar will have to deliver in early October. Oskar at first tries to write the lecture in English and fails miserably. The narrator then suggests that Oskar writes his lecture in German and then translates it into simple English. Oskar is having a hard time with writing the lecture, though this time he is writing in German, his mother tongue. The narrator observes this and attempts to defend his German friend by saying that Oskar has been a professional writer for a very long time, and that he knows his subject very well; thus, the narrator implies that there is something extremely difficult in writing this lecture, to the degree that it stops such a knowledgable and professional writer such as Oskar from making any progress in writing it.

I hope that I am not paraphrasing anything that you have not figured out for yourself already. English fictions can be confusing to read at times; you just have to fight your way through the mess of main clauses, dependent clauses, conjunctions, commas, semicolons, and others of that sort.
 
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