(This article was first published in May 2016 Lexpert)
Why Cool is So Cool
by
Howard Richler
When the
last century ended, I was somewhat bemused to read in John Ayto’s 20th Century Words, which
outlines new words of the past century to find the word “cool” was twice listed:
the first time in 1933 adjectively as a term of approval, and in 1953 as a verb
to mean to relax as in the expression “cool it.” The reason for my confusion was
my knowledge that in fact cool is a very ancient word and there are many
references to it in Old English (from the 5th to 11th
centuries) with the sense of a senses of calmness of emotions and lack of
enthusiasm as well as temperature.
What is
surprising about the word cool is its relative constancy in meaning as this is
particularly rare in words that have adjectival senses. For example in my
book How
Happy Became Homosexual and Other Mysterious Semantic Shifts , I mention
that the original sense of careful was “sorrowful”; nice originally meant “foolish”
or “stupid” shrewd also meant “foolish”
and initially an enormous appetite was not so much large as “abnormal.” The
opposite pattern often occurs when adjectives are endowed with less favourable
meanings as with the case of silly that originally meant “blessed” and it
connoted being “remarkably good” as late as 1845. The word fulsome is going
through a process of amelioration right before our eyes. Until recently, its
most common sense was “offensively excessive” but nowadays it is most likely to
be employed to mean either “extravagant” or “lavish” and increasingly to mean “full.”
So cool is
an anomaly in more or less having the same, albeit multiple senses for well
1000 years. It could mean “dispassionate,” (Chaucer uses it in this sense in a 1440
poem: “Thow thynkist in thyn wit that is full cole”) “audaciously
impudent,” “lukewarm,” “exhibiting a lack of warmth or affection,”
and “not caring about consequences” to name but some of the different flavours
of cool. Abraham Lincoln used cool in this
sense in 1860 when he said “That is cool” referring to the intention by
secessionists in the South to break up the country.
But.it took black jazzmen of the 1930s and
1940s to transform this word into its modern sense as a term of approval. This change
may have evolved from a previous slang sense of “shrewd” which itself may have
evolved from its “impudent” sense. Cool reached a wider audience after World War
II by which time it had acquired a sense of “laid-backness” associated with
jazz as well as one of “stylishness.” On
the jazz scene, the word cool first came to be associated with saxophone player
Lester “Pres” Young in the early 1940s.
The term made its debut in popular publications in 1948. That year a
headline in Life magazine announced,
“Bebop: New Jazz School is Led by Trumpeter who is Hot, Cool and Gone” and The New Yorker stated: “The bebop people
have a language of their own… Their expressions of approval include ‘cool’.” That same year music critics started to use cool
to describe a particular relaxed form of jazz. For example, a music review in The Bridgeport Telegram announced “Hot
jazz is dead. Long live cool jazz!” Probably
owing to the term’s endorsement by mainstream media it wasn’t long before cool
became a desired state of being for white adolescents. In an article entitled “When
‘Cool’ got Cool,” lexicographer Ben Zimmer relates that a "June 1952 article
about teen slang in the St. Joseph,
Michigan Herald-Press explained that ‘to be cool’ is the desire of every
teen-ager.”
Cool started
to lose some of its insouciance by the middle of the 1960s. As the term became
overused it lost its sense of an existential awareness that differentiated one
from “squares.” However, in the 1970s it
enjoyed a renaissance as people became nostalgic for the perceived simpler
times of the 1950s as exemplified by the popularity of the television show Happy Days(1974-1984) and the movie Grease (1978).
What explains
the endurance of cool? Linguist Donna Jo
Napoli believes its appeal lies in the “underspecified” nature that allows it
to adjust to many different contexts. I’m not convinced this alone explains its
popularity. In his book Contagion: Why Things Catch On, Jonah
Berger, a marketting professor at
University of Pennsylvania, posits an
interesting theory to explain the success of cool. He says that our senses,
such as sight, smell and touch, play a large part in determining which words
catch on. As examples, he mentions that the phrases “bright student” and “cold
person” are more popular that their equivalents “smart student” or “unfriendly
person.” He also cites the expression
“sudden increase” that came into vogue in the 19th century but was
superseded by the expression “sharp increase” that started to be used at the
start of the 20th century. Words like cool that describe those who
are “au courant” are particularly changeable which is why the term “spiffy”
from the 1940s and “swell” from the 1950s had a short shelf life.
This appeal
to the senses perhaps explains why cool has been hot for two millennia.
Richler’s
book Wordplay: Arranged & Deranged
Wit was published in May 2016
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