Now and then, the words “nifty” or “groovy” may drop into a conversation, instantly identifying the speaker as an old fart or, worse, an old hippie.
But the word “cool” doesn’t do that. Cool is constant. As a modifier, as the modified, as a noun and as a verb, cool has withstood the fleeting nature of most slang.
What is the reason for cool’s longevity? That’s an easy question for Keith Covington, a jazz club owner in Baltimore. As long as Miles Davis’ classic 1949 work, “Birth of the Cool,” remains the best-selling jazz album of all time, cool will stay cool, he says.
Cool still “carries the same weight and definition that it did 50 years ago,” Covington says. “Jazz musicians and jazz aficionados still refer to great works as cool.”
Cool comes in many flavors. Actress Kirsten Dunst, for instance, isn’t cool the way Miles Davis is cool. And yet, in a recent Elle profile, the word cool, used to describe the young actress, is a constant refrain, as in “Kirsten Dunst is inherently, organically, preternaturally cool. She’s ‘None of my friends are actresses’ cool. Catholic schoolgirl cool.'” And on and on.
Cool has been around for quite a while. Shakespeare used a form of cool as a verb, and later the word morphed into an adjective, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. The word cool has been applied since 1728 to large sums of money and used to mean “calmly audacious” since 1825, the same source maintains. Cool, meaning fashionable, is “said to have been popularized in jazz circles by tenor saxophonist Lester Young,” according to the etymology dictionary.
More Top Picks Terms
Of the word cool, “I can say one thing about it; it has not stood still,” says Donna Jo Napoli, a Swarthmore College professor of linguistics.
Cool is an example of an “underspecified word,” Napoli says. The less specific a word, the more meanings it can have. Assassinate is an example of a “highly determined” word, one that can’t be used in too many contexts, she says. The more unspecified a word is, the more staying power it has, she says.
“It’s amazing that [cool] is still around,” says Robert Beard, chief executive officer of yourDictionary.com and a retired professor of linguistics at Bucknell University. “Jazz won’t go away,” so “cool won’t go away,” he says.
Already uncool
While “cool” seems to have an unlimited shelf life, other slang terms go bad quickly. Lake Superior State University recently released its list of words that should be banished for “misuse, overuse and general uselessness.” Among them:
– Metrosexual
– X: As in “X-Files,” Xtreme, Windows XP and X-Box.
– Punked
– Companion animals: Known by many as pets.
– Bling or bling-bling
– LOL: “Laugh out loud” in e-mail speak.
– Embedded journalist
– Smoking gun
– Shock and awe
– Captured alive
– Hand-crafted latte
– Sanitary landfill: Also known as a dump.
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Edited by Joe Knowles ([email protected])