身を切るような寒さ

How do people use 身を切るような寒さ?

Everyday and a little literary, common in weather talk and in novels. Usually a noun phrase with だ or です (“外は身を切るような寒さだ”), or describing wind: “身を切るような風”. It’s about cold you feel on your skin, the cutting winter wind kind.

Also said 身を切るように冷たい

身を切るような寒さ in real sentences

• 外は身を切るような寒さだった。

  Soto wa mi o kiru yō na samusa datta.

  It was piercingly cold outside.

  Tatoeba, sentence by tommy_san, translation by sundown, CC BY 2.0 FR

• 身を切るような寒い中でわざわざ遊ばなくてもいいじゃない。

  Mi o kiru yō na samui naka de wazawaza asobanakute mo ii ja nai.

  You don’t have to play outside in the biting wind.

  Tatoeba, sentence by bunbuku, translation by AlanF_US, CC BY 2.0 FR

Where does 身を切るような寒さ come from?

Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (via Kotobank) defines 身を切る as hardship or cold so severe it feels like being cut, and gives its oldest example from the Sagami-shū, a poetry collection from around 1061, where the cutting is grief. Japanese Wiktionary quotes Akutagawa describing a sea wind as cold “like cutting the body”. The sense of paying out of pocket is a separate, later meaning from the Edo period.

Mistakes learners make with 身を切るような寒さ

Using 身を切る on its own. Without ような寒さ it usually means something else: paying out of your own pocket, or making a painful sacrifice, as in politicians’ “身を切る改革” (reform where we cut our own perks).

Other Japanese idioms like 身を切るような寒さ

• 骨身にしみる寒さ (honemi ni shimiru samusa: cold that soaks into flesh and bone)
• 肌を刺すような寒さ (hada o sasu yō na samusa: cold that stabs the skin)
• 凍えるような寒さ (kogoeru yō na samusa: freezing cold)
• 底冷え (sokobie: cold that creeps up from the ground)