[Steve]

The definition that I learned for "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a bras monkey" is as follows: When muzzle loading cannons were used on ships, each crew kept a pyramid of balls by the gun. They were held together by a triangle like ones used to rack billiard balls and it was called a monkey. Some officers bought ones made of brass because they looked good. The brass monkey and the iron balls had different expansion coefitients in heat and cold. When they sailed around the Horn of South America, it could get cold enough that the brass would contract enough to pop the balls out of the money and it was therefor "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey". I heard this from a Canadian shanty singer.