leave someone out in the cold

present singular third person leaves someone out in the cold · participle present leaving someone out in the cold · participle past left someone out in the cold · past left someone out in the cold

1. idiomaticTo deliberately fail to provide someone with support; to ignore or neglect.

   [H]e might have been looking for an excuse to cover his ass and leave the boy out in the cold.

   2010, Carol Phillip-Tudor, The Boy, the Professor, and Ella’s Regret, Pittsburgh, Pa.: RoseDog Books, →ISBN, page 235

   5 more examples

   I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write this is a horse under what I foolishly meant for one. Any key to a work of imagination would be nearly, if not quite, as absurd. The tale is there, not to hide, but to show: if it show nothing at your window, do not open your door to it; leave it out in the cold.

   1902, Laurence Housman, “[Appendix: What is a Fairy Tale?] ‘Introduction’ to Gammer Grethel’s Fairy Tales”, in Michael Newton, editor, Victorian Fairy Tales (Oxford World’s Classics), Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, published 2015, →ISBN, page 401; 1st paperback edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2016, →ISBN

   There was as yet no question of his [Albrecht von Wallenstein's] abandoning the Emperor [Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor], but he obviously meant to leave both Saxony and Bavaria out in the cold.

   1906, A[dolphus] W[illiam] Ward, “Wallenstein and Bernard of Weimar”, in A. W. Ward, G[eorge] W[alter] Prothero, Stanley Leathes, editors, The Cambridge Modern History, volume IV (The Thirty Years’ War), Cambridge: At the University Press, →OCLC, section 1 (Wallenstein’s End (1632–4)), page 234

   He [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] promised unemployment insurance—he give^([sic – meaning gives]) us the Wagner-Lewis bill which leaves entirely out in the cold the 17 million now unemployed.

   1935 June, Hays Jones, Seamen and Longshoremen under the Red Flag (In a Soviet America), New York, N.Y.: Workers Library Publishers, →OCLC; republished in Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Seventy-sixth Congress, First Session on H. Res. 282 […], volume 11, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 3 November 1939 (published 1940), →OCLC, page 6797

   While at first in the U.S.A. it may have been a matter of high-pressure salesmanship—and it has undoubtely been the irresistible enterprise of the General Motors Corporation, through its Electro-Motive subsidiary, that has set in motion this amazingly rapid transformation of American railway motive power, and has caused all the steam locomotive builders in the U.S.A. to follow suit or be left out in the cold—it seems now beyond dispute that, so far as the U.S.A. is concerned, the economics of the power question can be solved no other way.

   1950 January, Cecil J. Allen, “British Locomotive Practice and Performance”, in Railway Magazine, pages 12–13

   Although the settlement used the arguments of antismokers as a background, antismokers themselves were marginalized on account of their own long-standing prohibitionist policies. [...] Short of leaving themselves out in the cold and irrelevant, antismokers had no choice but to join as the lesser partners at the settlement table.

   2000, Gio Batta Gori, “Cigarettes at the Third Millennium”, in Virtually Safe Cigarettes: Reviving an Opportunity Once Tragically Rejected, Amsterdam: IOS Press, →ISBN, pages 16–17