Where did the phrase “dressed to kill” come from?
I believe that the term was from the older expression [circa 1920]“knock 'em dead !”
As in the case of a lady, the outfit she was wearing would make other women die with envy and make all men prove that imagination can provoke heavy breathing and palpitations-----------and an occasional proposition…
It could also have sprung from the theater where the star was given a nudge stageward with the admonition to,"go out there and knock 'em dead!
OR NOT!
EZ
"
: : 12-dressed to kill
DRESSED (FIT) TO KILL - “Spiffily turned out; nattily or showily attired (often with the implication that one has somewhat overdone it). Kill means no more here than to wow or impress. It is a hyperbolic way of saying one would or might overwhelm someone of the opposite sex by one’s good looks, clothes or personality. The expression was in the language by the 18th century, as reflected by Sir Richard Steele in ‘The Spectator’ in 1711: ‘If they (Handsome People) do not kill at first sight, as the Phrase is, a second Interview disarms them of all their Power.’ In a letter of 1818 John Keats wrote: ‘One chap was dressed to kill for the King in Bombastes.’” From “The Dictionary of Cliches” by James Rogers (Wings Books, Originally New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985).
http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/28/messages/643.html
“girded for battle”?
CMC fnord
I have always heard the phrase in the form, ‘dressed fit to kill’; it may be a coincidence, but I find a nearly identical phrase (in Greek) in Herodotus’ Histories, Book I ch. 109: There the child Cyrus is delivered by his grandfather, the Median King Astyages, to his steward Harpagus to be killed by exposure or otherwise, ‘kekosmhmenon thn epi thanatwi’, ‘dressed up [in clothes & ornaments] for death’. I think the phrase may have originally meant something like, ‘dressed up as you would be for your own funeral’, especially as in this case, a royal one.
Zombies dress in the clothes in which they died.