cold meat

cold meat (countable and uncountable, plural cold meats)

1. Any cold cooked meat such as luncheon meat or lunch meat, spam, chopped pork, corned beef, and so on.
2. (slang, uncountable) One or more corpses or something soon to be so literally or figuratively as an easy target.
   • 1964, Raymond Chandler, Killer in the Rain:

     All dead. Cold meat.

• cold meat box
• cold meat cart
• cold meat train

• 1873, John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary
• Lighter, Jonathan (1972) “The Slang of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, 1917-1919: An Historical Glossary”, in American Speech‎, volume 47, number 1/2, page 35