"Personal Checks You Can Bank On!" ™
What counts as cool changes on a regular basis. Check out the sites that promise to keep you in the loop, and each day the links include something else. Sky high heels that make you walk like a tottering foal or a new techno sound that utilizes wrappers and tin cans for musical instruments or films shot from lesser used perspectives have all at one time been referred to as cool. Product designer, Marvin Sanders, describes cool as the “elusive concept which promises the psyche of the young consumer.”
Cool is quite elusive. Most associate it with youth movements, going against the boring drabness of traditionalism and embracing a deeper fresher reality as underdog and rebel. Different characteristics compose this concept, and some trace its actual meaning all the way back to Aristotle. But the most clear connection is to Africa, starting in the 15th century.
In the Yoruba and Igbo tribes throughout West Africa, cool was a powerful and much sought after trait. It meant that one was at peace and unbothered by the tragedies and trials of life, capable of defusing all negative feelings. It formed one of the central pillars of their religions. This concept of self-control and impenetrable calm can also be found in the Gola people who lived in Liberia, providing nonchalance in times when one would expect someone to be overly emotional or passionate.
For something or someone to be cool, there had to be a far deeper spiritual strength. Since it was not repression, an individual who was cool had to express feelings through “cool” manners. In African Arts, Thompson describes this as an attitude which required expression through artistic expression. Over time, this word came to take on new definitions.
The word “cool” was first used in the United States during the jazz era. Word historians credit Lester Young, a talented tenor saxophonist, with first introducing it to the jazz circles. He participated in Count Basie’s orchestra, gaining popularity and a “hipster reputation” which helped define jazz as the music of the free thinker and fashionable rebel.
At this point, the word took on an additional layer of meaning. The “fashionable” component became extremely popular throughout the United States, growing along with the additional slang up through the 1950s. To be cool required now that a person have a calm demeanor, not be bothered by the trivialities of life, and at the same time, be fashionable in some sense. Sometimes that fashionability meant going against the typical fashion and being “true to self.”
From the jazz movement, “cool” became one of the code words of the Beat Generation. This was a group of post World War II writers who embodied the essence of the underdog and rebel, experimenting with all things once forbidden and testing the limits of what society would allow. The many writers and poets included Gary Snyder, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. They claimed that their goal was visionary enlightenment and expression. To this goal, though they did not fully realize the appropriateness of their word choice in light of its African roots, cool was central.
The word “cool” reached the supposed height of its popularity in the 1950s with the Beat Generation. But just as many of the Beat Generation’s ideals were embodied into the hippie movement of the 1960s, the youth grabbed hold of the word “cool” and used it to express themselves. Most other slang of that time began to fade, and, if etymologists had made their bets, “cool” would have vanished into the analogs of slang. Surprisingly, however, “cool” did not fade in the 70s or even the 80s. In fact, it is still a common term to this day.
Cool as a term has lasted far longer than other similar terms from its original introduction. The words “groovy,” “hip,” “swinging,” “jazzing,” and other similar words have attempted to convey the same meaning as “cool,” but they have all slipped into lesser use, some disappearing almost entirely except in attempts to bring back sounds of a particular generation. Humorously the word “cool” has even been used to describe slang that was “in,” forgetting that that word too was once slang.
Today, cool maintains its same deep meaning. It is used to refer to those things which are fashionable and which express something. But it is not limited to jazz or writing circles. It’s used regularly by a wide variety of ages and ethnicities, rarely realizing the much deeper and perhaps even “cooler” meaning of this still popular slang.