Colors

Red Meat

"Red meat" is generally used to refer to the meat of most mammals, such as cows and sheep.

It can also be used as an expression to indicate something very hardy and masculine.  "'Next month Lieutenant McClane will try to hurdle a new kind of obstacle. He’s about to find out if the summer movie audience still has a taste for cinematic red meat. 'Live Free or Die Hard,' the fourth installment of 20th Century Fox’s long-running 'Die Hard' series, has emerged as the only straight-ahead, major studio action film set for the year’s prime moviegoing weeks…"—Michael Cieply, “An Action Hero Breaks Summer’s Fantasy Spell,” The New York Times, May 23, 2007.

How It's Used

"Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a tablewhere red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale-ship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil."

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