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Can you use "cold" to describe a place?

No-Professor98
A friend of mine just came back from a business trip to Maine. She told us about how cold it was in Maine during winter. This is what she said: Of all the places I've been to, none of them were anywhere as cold as Maine. Does this sentence sound natural?

39 comments

wbenjamin13•
Yes this is a perfectly natural sentence.
sqeeezy•
yes
SkeletonCalzone•
Yep, that is a common way of saying that.
sophisticaden_•
What is the potential issue you perceive with using cold in this context?
GonzoMath•
Yes, that's exactly how I would say it. A "cold place" is a place with cold weather.
t3hgrl•
Yes, she means the weather made her feel cold and/or that the climate temperature was low.
kmoonster•
That is natural, yes. It's a bit of a poetic construction, but entirely natural and well within the normal grammar rules. You might appreciate a quote that is often attributed to Mark Twain (a 19th century fiction author): "The coldest winter I ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco". The joke there being that San Francisco is often foggy and have cool winds from the ocean in summer while surrounding cities are warm and breezy.
eruciform•
Totally normal For a New Yorker flair you can replace cold with Fuckin' freezing :-)
Ollie-Arrow-1290•
Absolutely! Source: I live in Maine by choice.
Redbeard4006•
Yes
miss-matron•
Yes it absolutely does. There's also another meaning: a "cold place" (intonation on the first word) describes an unused space in a house. In a big American house, for example, where we maybe eat in the living room in front of the tv or in the kitchen, and there's a dining room that only gets used on special occasions, or never, it's called a cold place, or cold space. Our backyard is a cold space and I'm trying to change that :)
TrittipoM1•
Sure. That's totally fine and perfectly natural.
perplexedtv•
The only thing wrong with the sentence is a missing 'near' after 'anywhere'.
MarsMonkey88•
Yes, that’s totally normal and natural.
zebostoneleigh•
Definitely. I’m typing this from a New York subways station. It’s cold here too.
SnarkyBeanBroth•
Of all the places I've been to, none of them were anywhere **near** as cold as Maine.
DharmaCub•
Yeah of course.
k464howdy•
perfectly true
IcosahedronGamer24•
That sounds perfectly fine. It just means that Maine is, in general, a cold place (as in, its weather is not warm)
TheLurkingMenace•
Natural and very accurate.
Stuffedwithdates•
Yes. For example there is a place in Wales called Cold Nap . It's a headland that suffers from cold winds and protects the bay from those winds so the bay is noticeably warmer
zeptozetta2212•
Sounds fine to me. Of course, a true native would say "it's mad brick in Maine."
90sefdhd•
Yes but elsewhere the grammar is incorrect (it's none…was, not none…were)
Evil_Weevill•
Yes. That's understood to mean that "the weather in this place tends to be cold"
SteampunkExplorer•
Yep. We say it all the time.
ShakeWeightMyDick•
Of course you can use "cold" to describe a place? What do you think the word would be limited to?
Complex-Ad-7203•
Yes.
flareon141•
Yes. What is your native tongue that is making it hard to describe a place as cold?
sufyan_alt•
Yes
quillb•
cold is an adjective so yeah
Nondescript_Redditor•
Yes
BackgroundDot2555•
Yeah, perfectly normal. For example: It's really cold here. Cold is an adjective, which means it describes other nouns.
yourfriendlyelf-•
SMH
MakePhilosophy42•
Cold is the opposite of hot. Winter in temperate climates near the poles tends to be cold, whereas summer tends to be hotter. "It was cold out last week, so it snowed"
pixeldraft•
There are some "cold" synonyms that make more sense for places than objects but "cold" itself is flexible. The park was really frigid. = ✅ My drink was really frigid. = ❌
turtlemub•
Yes, perfectly natural. As natural as saying trees are pretty or skyscrapers are tall
idril1•
struggling to understand how else you would describe a place that was cold
clearly_not_an_alt•
I would say "... anywhere near as cold as ...", but describing a place as cold is perfectly normal.
donkey2342•
“Cold” can also mean unfriendly and rude. “That waiter was so cold, took forever to bring our food”.