The Times Literary Supplement, the erudite British weekly, isn’t the first place you would expect to find an outbreak of cool. But for a recent stretch of a few months, its letters page was home to a protracted debate over exactly how cool got cool.
It all started in January, when Toby Lichtig reviewed “Journey by Moonlight,” a 1937 novel by the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb that has recently been translated into English by Len Rix. Lichtig gave a thumbs up to Rix’s rendering, but he complained about the text’s occasional anachronisms, particularly the use of cool “in its contemporary sense” — that is, in the “stylish” or “admirable” meaning popularized by the cool cats and chicks of the postwar era and exemplified by the all-purpose expression of appreciation or approval, “That’s cool.”
A parade of nine T.L.S. readers questioned how modern the “contemporary sense” of cool actually is, pulling out 19th- and early-20th-century quotations from writers as diverse as Wilkie Collins and T. E. Lawrence to support the idea that our current understanding of cool is not so new after all. E. D. Hirsch Jr., the American author of “Cultural Literacy,” even chipped in with a line from Abraham Lincoln (“That is cool”). The whole discussion, unfortunately, drifted into a muddle of anecdotes without any firm grip on the semantics of cool.
The letter writers would have been well served to consult some cool lexicography, particularly the thorough treatment of the word in Jonathan Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang or the even more comprehensive entry for cool in the online Oxford English Dictionary. What the dictionaries tell us is that some shades of cool are quite old indeed. Already by the time of “Beowulf,” a millennium ago, the original low-temperature meaning of cool had veered into the realm of human emotion — or rather the lack thereof. From Old English to the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare all the way to the present, cool has been able to mean “dispassionate, calm, self-composed.” Some of our latter-day cool expressions — “stay cool,” “play it cool,” “cool as a cucumber,” “cool customer” — play off this ancient connotation of implacability.
By the early 18th century, emotional coolness had branched off in another direction: “assured and unabashed where diffidence and hesitation would be expected,” as the O.E.D. has it. This impudent style of cool — no longer in common usage — is the one that turns up in the examples from Abraham Lincoln and Wilkie Collins given by the T.L.S. readers. Lincoln’s line, “That is cool,” from his 1860 speech at Cooper Union, was a response to the audacity of secessionist demands. Collins, likewise, has a character in his 1868 novel, “The Moonstone,” say, “Cool!” when presented with an insolent request. In both cases, cool was used disapprovingly, quite distinct from later, more positive uses.
Those early instances of cool are easy enough to explain, but what of the intriguing contribution to the T.L.S. colloquy from Allan Peskin, a biographer of President James A. Garfield? Peskin found an 1881 letter by Garfield’s teenage daughter Mollie to a friend, telling of her crush on her father’s private secretary, Joseph Stanley-Brown. “Isn’t he cool!” Mollie gushed in the letter. The “audaciously impudent” sense of cool wouldn’t seem to work here, since, as Peskin points out, Mollie went on to marry Stanley-Brown when she came of age. Could Mollie have been ahead of her time, already using cool to mean “sophisticated, stylish” or “admirable, excellent”?
Though it would be indubitably cool to find a hidden connection between schoolgirl talk of the 1880s and later hipster slang, my best guess is that Mollie was describing her future husband with the older “cool, calm and collected” nuance. “As a private secretary,” Peskin told me when I asked about Mollie’s letter, “Stanley-Brown demonstrated the customary diffidence that was expected of someone in his position.” Still, Peskin said he finds it difficult to believe that a teenage girl would be infatuated with a man for being dispassionate.
Sad to say, the historical evidence isn’t on the side of Mollie as a proto-cool chick. Even in African-American usage, where the later slang developments of cool would percolate, nothing definitive has been found to establish it as a general term of approval before the 20th century. An 1884 article by J. A. Harrison on “Negro English” includes “Dat’s cool!” in a list of undefined interjections, but there’s no way of knowing if the exclamation was merely a comment on a person’s assuredness or audacity, fitting in with one of the earlier meanings.
A half century later, cool was still by no means widespread as a mark of admiration among African-Americans. Zora Neale Hurston, a great chronicler of black speech, used the expression “whut make it so cool” several times in her writings, both fictional and ethnographic, beginning in 1933. But cool is conspicuously absent from lexicons of “jive slang” compiled in the late ’30s by the bandleader Cab Calloway and the New York Amsterdam News editor Dan Burley.
What we think of as modern cool (“Cool, man!”) does not come on the scene in a serious way until the early 1940s, in jazz circles — with the credit often given to the hipper-than-hip saxophonist Lester Young. It would take another decade for the slang word to hit the American mainstream, taking off among white teeny-boppers circa 1952. From our current vantage point, it’s easy to read older examples of cool as variations on the now-entrenched colloquial use. But for lovers of linguistic verisimilitude, that’s just uncool.
