The History Of The African American Vernacular English Slang Word "Cool" (excerpt of a 2014 online article)

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents an article excerpt on the history and meanings of the African American Vernacular English slang word "cool".

The content of this post is presented for linguistic, historical, and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to David Skinner for his research and for writing this article. Thanks to National Endowment for the Humanities for funding this research, and publishing this article online. Thanks also to all those who are quoted in this article.

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ARTICLE EXCERPT
[This article includes photographs that aren't included in this excerpt. This entire article is well worth the read.]

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/julyaugust/feature/how-did-cool-become-such-big-deal-0# "How Did Cool Become Such a Big Deal?"

It’s more than a word. It’s an attitude and a lifestyle.

[by] David Skinner

HUMANITIES, July/August 2014, Volume 35, Number 4

 "Cool is still cool. The word, the emotional style, and that whole flavor of cultural cachet remains ascendant after more than half a century.

It is, according to linguistic anthropologist Robert L. Moore, the most popular slang term of approval in English. Moore says cool is a counterword, which is a term whose meaning has broadened far beyond its original denotation.

For a millennium or so, cool has meant low in temperature, and temperature itself has long been a metaphor for psychological and emotional states (a cool reception, hotheaded). Chaucer, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, used cool to describe someone’s wit, Shakespeare to say, “More than cool reason ever comprehends.”

But starting around the 1930s, cool began appearing in American English as an extremely casual expression to mean something like ‘intensely good.’ This usage also distinguished the speaker, italicizing their apartness from mainstream culture.

As its popularity grew, cool’s range of possible meanings exploded. Pity the lexicographer who now has to enumerate all the qualities collecting in the hidden folds of cool: self-possessed, disengaged, quietly disdainful, morally good, intellectually assured, aesthetically rewarding, physically attractive, fashionable, and on and on.

Cool as a multipurpose slang word grew prevalent in the fifties and sixties, Moore argues, displacing swell and then outshowing countless other informal superlatives such as groovy, smooth, awesome, phat, sweet, just to name a few. Along the way, however, it has become much more than a word to be broken down and defined. It is practically a way of life.

Where did it start? What were its original components? And what, specifically, about that feeling of being transported above the small-time pettiness of the everyday, that liberating and wonderful air of amazement that would be sense number one if I were to write my own subjective definition of cool?

[...]

...I tally up three ingredients that my vague sense of history tells me are essential to cool at this point in time: Cool is urban; it is strongly associated with jazz; and it has something to do with race.

In a word, cool is black. Or, to be more accurate, there was a historical period in the evolution of the modern concept of cool when it seemed to be a property, largely but not exclusively, of African Americans.

Moore cites an early instance of cool in its slang form in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1935 collection Mules and Men, in which a man talks about his “box” or guitar: “Ah don’t go nowhere unless I take my box wid me. . . . And what make it so cool, Ah don’t go nowhere unless I play it.”

If African-American slang is the cradle of the new kind of cool, then jazz culture was its nursemaid. Popular American music was already quite friendly to the vernacular, but swing-style jazz went so far as to turn language into a self-conscious plaything. Starting in 1938, Cab Calloway began publishing his “Hepster’s Dictionary,” a pamphlet explaining that “jive talk is now an everyday part of the English language. Its usage is now accepted in the movies, on the stage, and in the song products of Tin Pan Alley.”

Subverting the usual method of explaining unusual words in more familiar language, the “Hepster’s Dictionary” was the un-Webster’s. To be unhep was to be “not wise to the jive, said of an icky, a Jeff, a square.” A square was an “unhep person (see icky; Jeff).” And an icky was “one who is not hip, a stupid person.” A Jeff was “a pest, a bore, an icky.”

What jazz did to American slang can also be seen in The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground, edited by Glenn O’Brien. This new volume from Library of America boasts several beautiful pieces of writing from musicians whose memoirs, usually completed with the help of professional writers, are particularly rich in sociolinguistic and literary history. From the 1940s onward, they record a vast number of moments when race and culture shaped a new set of psychological postures that have come to seem broadly American.

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Near the mid-century point, cool was catching on big time. In 1947, the Charlie Parker Quartet recorded its album Cool Blues. A year later, the New Yorker explained, “The bebop people have a language of their own. . . . Their expressions of approval include ‘cool!’” And, in 1949, Miles Davis recorded The Birth of the Cool, pioneering a style of jazz that ironically would come to be associated with white people and the West Coast. In 1951, Broyard revisited his essay on the hipster, in an essay in Commentary called “Keep Cool, Man.” Here he described cool as a byproduct of the Negro’s “contact with white society.”

There is another narrative of cool, well told in American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style, that describes emotional detachment as part of a broader revision of Victorian standards. Race and music play no significant role, while modern psychology, especially in the workplace and, later, among parents and children, rewrites earlier scripts for childhood development, marriage, and socialization.

Along the way, emotional intensity becomes the anti-ideal. Fear, anger, and jealousy are tagged as obstacles to becoming well-adjusted adults, workers, and spouses. From Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, in which happy workers are presumed to be more productive, to Dr. Spock’s advice that children be taught to control their temper, the new thinking looks to save the mature adult from becoming a slave to his or her passions.

Stearns does not see this emotional style as particularly associated with African Americans. Quite the opposite. The few mentions of African-American culture in American Cool discuss the heated verbal style of black politics as a counterexample to mainstream cool, which Stearns attributes to the broad middle class, with a major caveat that his is “not a full study of the larger and more diverse national experience.”

Still, there is much to learn from Stearns’s research. In the same period when FDR said Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself, American parents were told that “their main job” was to “prevent fears” and teach their children to vent their fears by voicing them. Jealousy and anger were targeted as bad emotions. The jealous friend and spouse became a common foil in light fiction. Where Victorians saw righteous potential in anger, twentieth-century labor experts saw the angry manager as his own worst enemy: “It is of the utmost importance that the foreman remain cool.”

 This is not the same as the slang term cool, and yet it is semantically indistinguishable from what Mezzrow has in mind when he described a man who is “cool and suave on the outside but with a heart full of evil.” A difference that is frequently mentioned is knowingness. A person who is really cool, in the slang sense, knows he’s cool, and may even flaunt it.

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Talking about cool became a journalistic parlor game in the 1950s. 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. In 1959, it is being explained to intellectuals in Encounter; in 1960, it’s in Life magazine.

The personification of cool, however, continued to be the hipster. Norman Mailer, a close reader of Anatole Broyard, was clearly influenced by Broyard’s essays on the subject, but made the connection to black culture even more explicit in “The White Negro.”

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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 1963 history of blues and jazz, Blues People. 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. More or less a beatnik at the time, Jones was already a provocateur, although his take on cool could be described as conventional by today’s standards.

Cool jazz began with Miles Davis, who, Jones points out, “went into a virtual eclipse of popularity during the high point of the cool style’s success.” Perhaps Davis’s personal problems were to blame, but Jones complains that more than once he has read articles calling Miles Davis “a bad imitation” of the white West Coast trumpeter Chet Baker, the embodiment of cool jazz success. If anything, Jones said, it was the other way around.

The greater irony, however, for Jones was that cool jazz “seemed to represent almost exactly the opposite of what cool as a term of social philosophy had been given to mean.” For black people, to be cool was to be “calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose.” Cool was a quietly rebellious response to the history of slavery and post-Civil War injustices. “The term was never meant to connote the tepid new popular music of the white middle-brow middle class. On the contrary, it was exactly this America that one was supposed to ‘be cool’ in the face of.”

By this point, however, cool was well-noticed and recorded. In 1961, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, mentioned cool jazz and added a new sense to its old definition of cool: “mastery of the latest in approved technique and style.” A few years later, according to Moore, cool outpaces swell, until then the most prominent slang term of approval going back to the teens and twenties.

Linguists have a term for insisting that a word must always mean what it once meant. It’s called the etymological fallacy. It’s a fallacy because meanings change over time, just as cool has gone from referring to a certain temperature to a word my eight-year-old son uses to describe his new BMX bike. And yet words also come bearing history, emitting scents picked up on the roads they’ve traveled. 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.

It also reminds us of another function of slang, one elucidated recently by Michael Adams in his book Slang: The People’s Poetry. 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.

*This article was updated on July 29, 2014. A paraphrase of a piece of wall text in the "American Cool" exhibit was rewritten to better reflect the curators’ intentions. And the subsequent sentence was revised."

 About the author:

David Skinner is editor of Humanities.

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