What does "subject cold" mean?

[lebaviet]

I'm having a problem with the phrase "subject cold", or "know one's subject cold". Please read the text below:

Neither of us said much about the lecture he had to give early in the October, and I kept my fingers crossed. It was somehow to come out of what we were doing daily, I think I felt, but exactly how, I had no idea; and to tell the truth, thought I didn’t say so to Oskar, the lecture frightened me. That and the ten more to follow during the fall term. Later, when I learned that he had been attemping with the help of the dictionary, to write in english and had produced “a complete disaster”, I suggested maybe he ought to stick to German and we could afterwards both try to put it into passable English. I was cheating when I said that because my German is eager, enough to read simple stuff but certainly not good enough for serious translation. He sweated with it, but no matter what language he tried, though he had been a professional writer for a generation and knew his subject cold, the lecture refused to move past page one.

So... can anyone show me its meaning? :| Thanks a lot! :D

[Marylin]

[QUOTE=lebaviet]I'm having a problem with the phrase "subject cold", or "know one's subject cold". Please read the text below and in these four links:



cold (adj.) it's campus slang for perfect, complete.

to know one's subject cold means to know it perfectly well, completely.

[lebaviet]

Thank you very much, Marylin :) And how about "to move past page one"? Is it an idiom too?

[Tdol]

If a discussion isn't going anywhere and you think it's better to move onto a new topic, then use "to move past page one" to suggest this.

[lebaviet]

Thankx, tdol. The phrase "to move past page one" is also in the text I quoted above, so I just asked about it in this topic. However, if this is the forum's rule, I'll do as you said

>> I'm just a newbie here, but I had good impression on this forum. ... Such a good place for studying English.

[RonBee]

You're doing just fine.