Why Cool Is So Cool

When the past century ended, I was somewhat bemused to read, in John Ayto’s 20th Century Words, that the word “cool” was twice listed: the first time in 1933 adjectivally as a term of approval; and in 1953 as a verb to mean to relax, as in the expression “cool it.” The reason for the confusion was my incidental knowledge that, in fact, cool is an ancient word — there are many references to it in Old English (from the 5th to 11th centuries) with senses denoting calmness of emotion, lack of enthusiasm, as well as temperature. ...
Why Cool Is So Cool
When the past century ended, I was somewhat bemused to read, in John Ayto’s 20th Century Words, that the word “cool” was twice listed: the first time in 1933 adjectivally as a term of approval; and in 1953 as a verb to mean to relax, as in the expression “cool it.” The reason for the confusion was my incidental knowledge that, in fact, cool is an ancient word there are many references to it in Old English (from the 5th to 11th centuries) with senses denoting calmness of emotion, lack of enthusiasm, as well as temperature.

What’s surprising about the word cool is its relatively stable meaning
particularly rare in words that have adjectival senses. In my book How Happy Became Homosexual and Other Mysterious Semantic Shifts, I note 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,” which originally meant “blessed” and then, as late as 1845, connoted a sense of being “remarkably good.” 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, definitions for well over 1,000 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 jazzmen of the 1930s and ’40s 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 the Second World War, by which time it had acquired a sense of the “laid-back feel” 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 year music critics started to use cool to describe a particular relaxed form of jazz. 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 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 “cool people” 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 TV 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 different contexts. I’m not convinced this alone explains its popularity. In his book Contagion: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the 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 than 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 the word cool has been hot for well over a thousand years.

Howard Richler’s latest book, Wordplay: Arranged & Deranged Wit, was published this spring.