- Slang words are essentially me I'm not talking about those web with a white block lettering.

I mean, the original definition coined by scientist Richard Dawk to mean a unit of culture or behavior that can replicate a A slang word, much like a biolog may start in a small community and then quickly spread to new h eventually dominate a population and then, if conditions are not die out as suddenly as it arrive Of course, not all slan words had the same shelf life.

Hip outlived groovy, sweet lasted longer than fresh, and lit outshowed fleek.

However, there is one slang word to rule them all.

One that has survived generation without a gap in popularity.

The unquestioned champion of ubi and longevity, and that's cool.

- That's cool, man.

- That's cool.

- That's cool.

- And that's cool, that's cool.

- Cool.

- Cool.

- Cool.

- Cool.

- Cool.

- Cool.

- Cool, cool, cool.

- But where does the linguistic of cool come from?

Is it the sound of the word, the etymology, the people it's associated with?

What makes cool so cool?

I'm Dr.

Erica Brozovsky and this is "Other Words."

(soft music) - [Speaker] Other words.

- As a slang word, cool has a lot of usages and they're almost all positive.

It can mean laid back and confid trendy and fashionable, impressive or awe inspiring.

It can be a verb, as in cool it, a state of forgiveness like, are An intensifier, like a cool mill Or just a term of approval as in wanna see a movie?

Cool.

It's even spawn phonetic variants like coo and kewl.

The original literal meanin of cool is basically not warm.

It comes from the old English co and even back then it had a positive connotation, as in uncomfortable or moderate.

That may be why in "Beowulf," the title character promises that he can cool the cares of a distraught king.

Several hundred years later, Shakespeare used it in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends."

In both instances, it's used to a calm, dispassionate mental sta which is not surprising considering that emotions like anger and lust wer described, conversely, as hot.

As Gertrude implores Hamlet, "Oh, gentle son, upon the heat a of thy distemper, sprinkle cool patience."

This means that for at least 500 the word cool has been used to describe a desirably calm att but that's more metaphor than sl It would be Americans who would really give the word it's modern meaning, specifically, African Americans.

In 1884, a professor named James A. Harrison published an enthusiastic, though condescending article about African American vernacula which included a long list of Black interjections, among them, the phrase dat's coo A few decades later, the word turns up in Zora Neale Hurston's short story, "The Gilded Six-Bits," with a slangly positive connotat "And whut make it so cool, he got money 'cumulated and womens give it all to him."

Although cool might of been long of African American slang, most cultural historians agree that it was a genre of music that launched it into the mainstream, jazz.

From Anna Lee Chisholm's "Cool kind Daddy Blues," to Miles Davis' "Birth of the Co the word was used to describe a certain kind of musicality, but also a type of personality, laid back, competent, and confid By the late forties, The New Yorker noted the terms rising popularity.

"The bebop people have a language of their own, their expressions of approval include, cool."

In the 1950s, the word cool started to be co-opted by white counterculture, specifically the beatniks and one of the first beat novels Author John Clellon Holmes uses the word liberally.

"When the music is cool, it' pleasant, somewhat meditative, and without tension.

Everything before, you see, just was crazy, frantic, gone.

Now everybody's acting cool, unemotional, withdrawn.

But look here, that gu coming to that table is cool."

In his 1957 essay, "The White Negro," writer Norman Mailer tried to draw a line from whit hipsters to the Black community.

He claimed that being cool was more than just a laid back a It specifically referred to calmness in the face of cruelty and horror, something African Americans knew a lot about.

This is somewhat supported by a line in Harrison's 1884 art that defines looking cool as "Not being afraid."

According to Mailer, World War I and the advent of nuclear weapon introduced white Americans to the same sort of existential that Black Americans were well familiar with, which gave them the opportunity to be cool about it.

The sense of cool as a rejection of fear went mainstream in the 1 In the film "West Side Story," gang leader Riff tries to ease his crew's jitters before a big fight with a song appropriately titled, "Cool."

♪ Just play it cool boy.

♪ ♪ Real cool.

♪ - [Erica] Paul Newman plays a pr who never cracks despite relentl by sadistic guards in the 1967 film, "Cool Hand Luke."

By the end of the decade, it was even popping up in Saturday morning cartoons.

- Now play it cool.

- Cool?

I am an ice cube.

(audience laughing) Social historian Peter N. Stearn claims that the ability to control emotions like fear and anger became very in the second half of the 20th c And the popularity of cool refle Maybe that's why the coolest movie characters are the ones who don't get flust in dangerous situations.

- We're gonna to be cool.

- In the seventies and eighties, the mainstream definition of coo to include trendy, desirable, or even just good.

- It'd be a lot cooler if you di - It eventually eclipsed what had long been the most popular slang word for that purpose, swell.

Swell dates back to the 18th century as a slang word for a person who is wealthy and think puffed up or swollen.

♪ We're a couple of swells.

♪ - As the term morphed from a noun to an adjective, it came to mean fancy or fashion and eventually became general expression of approval.

- Oh gee, that's swell, congratu - Today, swell has been so thoroughly replaced by cool that it's pretty much only used as a way to sound old fashioned.

- Isn't our son swell?

- Gee, that's swell.

- Why is that?

What is it about cool that allow to dethrone the previous king of A 2015 study tracked the popularity of various words and phrases over time and found that terms that evoke a sensory experience are more likely to persevere than those that don For instance, sharp increase became a more popular way to say sudden increase and a bright future became more than a promising future.

In fact, the study found that people were 50% more likely to remember a list of metaphors if they contain sensory words.

Perhaps swell with its convolute was just too abstract to compete with the physical sensation of c but it seems to me that the hist of the word outweighs its semant The influence of Africa American culture that persists to this day is hard to overstate The jazz and blues of the early 20th centur didn't just dominate pop music, it is the foundation of pop musi and all of the fashion, trends, and language that blossomed from it.

In a certain aspect, cool isn't really slang.

Slang words usually come about as an alternate way to describe something that alrea Cool, on the other hand, was the to describe something new, a new way to look at the world and interact with each other, a new cultural value system that began in the jazz clubs of and thanks to new medi technologies like radio and TV spread across the globe.

It makes sense to me that the word cool is still with because we're still living in that value system.

Being cool is just as important as it was a hundred years ago, and as long as it stays that way there'll be no better way to say