Get Cold Feet

Nobody has ever definitively settled where this one comes from, despite it being in common use for well over a century. One theory traces a similar Italian sense, meaning short of money rather than nervous, to Ben Jonson's 1605 play Volpone. Another points to German, where "kalte Füße bekommen" carries almost exactly the same meaning, with a German novel from 1862 featuring a card player who quits a game claiming his feet had gone cold. The plainest theory is simply physical: fear and hesitation can make you freeze up, as if your feet genuinely had turned to ice. The phrase settled into its familiar English form in America around 1893.