In the gnarly world of far-out slang, only 'cool' is still groovy
By LARRY NEUMEISTER
Updated: 1/30/2006 6:44:10 AM
NEW YORK (AP) -- Groovy is over, hip is square, far out is long gone. Don't worry, though -- it's cool.
"Cool" remains the gold standard of slang in the 21st century, as reliable as a blue-chip stock, surviving like few expressions ever in our constantly evolving language. It has, despite the pressures of staying relevant and trendy, kept its cool through the centuries -- even as its meaning changed drastically.
How cool is that?
Way cool, say experts who interpret words and slang for their messages about society.
"Cool is certainly a charter member for the slang hall of fame," says Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of popular culture. "Cool just sits back and keeps getting used generation after generation and lets the whole history of the language roll off its back."
Thompson estimates using the word 50 times a day "as an egghead professor" because no other word, slang or otherwise, quite does the job.
Before it became slang, cool gained a prominent place in language: first for its literal reference to temperature, and later as a favorite metaphor of writers as far back as Chaucer in the 1300s.
Thompson credits its casual acceptance and versatility for its staying power. A word like groovy splashes onto the scene but dies quickly as children mock their parents with references to "The Brady Bunch," he said.
Cool, in contrast, "emerged into the language in such a cool kind of way, it never became dated," Thompson said.
In 1602, Shakespeare wrote that Queen Gertrude told Hamlet: "O gentle son, Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper, Sprinkle cool patience."
As the centuries passed, cool took on new meanings. By the 17th century, the word helped define a woman's ability to allay a man's passion through sex.
The flames of passion were soon cooled, as cooler heads prevailed. By the horse and buggy era, "cooling one's heels" described the need to rest a horse with overheated hooves. The 1800s saw the use of cool off, meaning to kill, and the cool customer.
As an expression, though, cool largely kept its cool until the 1900s, when it exploded in versatility and popularity.
Early in the century, it was used to refer to large amounts of money: a cool million dollars. In the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge created a campaign slogan in his run for the White House: "Keep Cool With Coolidge." By the 1930s, cool as a cucumber was "the bee's knees" -- slang of the era for excellent.
But by the 1940s, the word exploded into popular usage through its constant use in jazz clubs, where musicians showed the versatility of a word that had already enjoyed wide use in the nation's black population.
The 1997 book, "America in So Many Words," published by Houghton Mifflin Co., traces the origination of the modern usage of cool to the late 1940s. In 1947, the book noted, the Charlie Parker Quartet recorded "Cool Blues."
A year later, Life magazine titled an article "Bebop: New Jazz School is Led by Trumpeter Who is Hot, Cool and Gone." And in 1948, The New Yorker said "the bebop people have a language of their own. ... Their expressions of approval include 'cool.' "
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, said the word should have faded away at the end of the fifties. Instead, it was adopted and redefined by hippies, followed by surfers, rappers and techno-geeks.
"Click here for cool stuff," Nunberg says of its current incarnation. "There's some question whether this is reinvention or retro," he says.
Peter N. Stearns, a social historian at George Mason University and author of the book "American Cool," said cool exploded in popularity in the 1950s and 1960s because society needed a word to express attitude without anger.
"We were dealing with a culture that was placing an increasing premium on controlling emotion, particularly anger," he said. The hippies in the 1960s used the word to "promote the notion that they were relaxed and not angry," Stearns said.
Since then, he said, the expression has lost some of its strength even as it has grown in usage -- especially in advertising.
"It's overused to the extent it doesn't have a great meaning," he said. "When we say somebody's looking cool, we don't have as much sense of meaning as we did 40 years ago. Now we just mean he's looking good."
Thompson said there's no reason to believe that cool will ever go the way of linguistic dinosaurs like "bad" (meaning good) or "chill" (meaning cool out).
"It just keeps swaggering along," he said. "I think this has gone beyond slang and into a word that is so useful and versatile that it is just one of the words we use. There are no other words in the vocabulary that quite do the job.
"Cool is already firmly ensconced in several generations. It's got street cred. And it had street cred before we even used the phrase street cred."
Some slang that didn't pass the test of time
Groovy
Neat/neato
Hip
Slick
Keen
Chill
Excellent
Heavy
NOT
Outta sight
Far out
Top drawer
Buttah
Dynamite
Phat
Off the hook
Sweet
Radical
Gag me with a spoon
Super
Gnarly
The cat's pajamas
Def
Copasetic
Trip
Fab
Da bomb
Rad
Beat
Classy
Wack
Square
With it
Burnout
Right on
The fuzz
Copper
Nifty
Out of this world
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