In French, sang froid casts a wide net over all things related to blood that’s not hot. Thus, Francophones use the expression to describe both the life-giving liquid in the arteries of tortoises and the clear-minded courage of people we admire, as well as the malice aforethought of the thoughtfully malicious.
In English, however, we restrict the meaning of sang froid to the mental equilibrium that allows a person faced with a stressful situation to act in a calm, deliberate, and, at times, creative manner. ‘I cannot countenance his two-timing. But when both of his belles-amies made a simultaneous appearance at the soirée, Digby Dinwiddie displayed remarkable sang froid. “Fredegunda Fensterbrecher”, he said, “allow me to present Anna Phylaxis. If I am not too badly mistaken, you have much in common.”’
The long sojourn of sang froid in the language of the Bard allows us to reserve ‘cold blood’ to matters of the sort that provide Forensics Files with its raison d’être. Thus, when Truman Capote put In Cold Blood on the cover of one of his books, he left no doubts about the subject of the work. Likewise, when we describe someone as a ‘cold-blooded snake’, the epithet has nothing to do with the absence of a thermostat in the slithery critter’s circulatory system.
As might be expected, the original form of sang froid keeps company with a phrase that covers all things that folk south of the Ottawa would translate as either ‘warm blooded’ or ‘hot blooded’. Thus, persons of the parlez-vous persuasion enjoy the freedom to wax rhapsodic about both the sang chaud of fur-bearing beasts and the sang chaud of excessively passionate human beings.
Thanks to the broad canyon that separates ‘warm blooded’ from ‘hot blooded’, we Anglophones have found no need to import sang chaud. Indeed, I have only made one sighting of that phase in an English-language work. (‘Twas a painfully pretentious piece of pedantic prose called The Hero, the Mad Male Id, and a Feminist Beowulf: The Sexualizing of an Epic. How I wish that such a work, and the title it bears, was as much a product of my imagination as Mesdemoiselles Fensterbrecher and Phylaxis.)
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