He moved with a huge exhaustion, as though sleep walking, and his lethargy was so consummate that it seemed to accelerate the universe around him. He sprawled at the table between the redhead and the other fellow, his head sunk into his palms, the brim of his zoot hat lowered just far enough so that no light from the bandstand could reach him. He became particularly immobile during the hottest music, as though it was a personal challenge to his somnambulism on the part of the musicians.
Talking about cool became a journalistic parlor game in the s. The phrase cool cat, for example, which shows up little before this, quickly spreads from music publications such as Billboard and Metronome to On the Road by Jack Kerouac. The personification of cool, however, continued to be the hipster. He spoke for those who, having lived through World War II, now understood that all could die at any second.
Humanity had proven itself a great collective murderer, and the modern state was its greatest weapon. The essay ends with a vision of an all-out race war convulsing the United States. Biographer J. Lipton was no fictional character, but a jesting reference to the marijuana tea that Mailer imbibed before sitting down to write.
It is generally believed that it is not until the sixties that cool goes viral, as we would say. But before it does, Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka takes up its meaning in his history of blues and jazz, Blues Peo ple.
For Jones, the obvious context for a discussion of cool is the recent history of cool jazz and the longer history of African-American inequality. If anything, Jones said, it was the other way around. By this point, however, cool was well-noticed and recorded. As I walked through the exhibition, the images of cool increasingly came from areas of American life far removed from jazz. Even Woody Guthrie, who in the s was everything cool was not: white, rural, and folksy.
Linguists have a term for insisting that a word must always mean what it once meant. Cool in its slang form is certainly an example of this, carrying an invisible statement of origins, reminding us of the treasures of jazz, black culture generally, and the difficult history of integration. Slang is creative, aesthetically interesting, and rich in meta-commentary, some of which becomes hard to discern just a few years later, less so perhaps in the case of a word like cool, which is still readily used and readily understood, but at times can be a little hard to nail down.
And the subsequent sentence was revised. NEH has funded numerous research, education, preservation, and media projects on the history of jazz and its contributions to American popular culture.
Joel Norman Dinerstein, the James H. NEH has supported numerous projects devoted to language history, including four volumes of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang , edited by Jonathan Lighter and Jesse Sheidlower. NEH was also a key supporter of the founding of the Library of America.
Skip to main content. The National Endowment for the Humanities. Twitter Facebook. Photo caption. Cab Calloway, lexicographer of jive. About the author. Britannica English: Translation of cool for Arabic Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Essential Meaning of cool. See More Examples The surface is cool to the touch. The plant grows best in cool climates. I'm feeling a little cool. He is a cool customer.
Full Definition of cool Entry 1 of 4. Definition of cool Entry 2 of 4. Definition of cool Entry 3 of 4. Definition of cool Entry 4 of 4. Choose the Right Synonym for cool Adjective cool , composed , collected , unruffled , imperturbable , nonchalant mean free from agitation or excitement.
Examples of cool in a Sentence Adjective The weather is cool today. The surface is cool to the touch. We changed into some cooler clothes. She remained calm, cool, and collected.
Verb The fan cools the engine. His interest in her has cooled somewhat. Carol : I went to the mall last night Dave : Cool. To wear a kilt and drink wine by yourself. Damn, ryan is so cool in the OG Glasgow kilt. Ironic deconstruction of an ideal state. Michael Jordan's apprisal of commercials for the consumer-oriented McDonald's was a cool deconstruction of the 's model athlete.
Craig is cooler than Rachael no matter what. Bowties Fezes Stetsons Bunk Beds. Bowties are cool!
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