It’s Cool

I first heard the term “cool” on “Dobie Gillis” (the show had a much longer name that I can’t remember.) One of the regular characters was a semi brain-dead beatnik named Maynard G. Krebs, played by Bob Denver of Gilligan’s Island fame. Seems that in the beatnik era, everything positive was either “cool” or “groovy” – typically followed by “man” as in “cool, man.”

They say that history repeats itself, but I didn’t expect such a literal repeat. Everything is “cool” again.

It’s such a vague word. Among the ways I can understand its meaning are:

• Excellent
• Awesome
• Neat
• OK
• Acceptable
• I can live with that

As you can see, the spectrum is really almost anything that is not negative and moves from superlative to marginal. You can usually tell what is meant in a particular case, especially if you hear it said, although reading it is usually as clear. It’s not quite as bad as saying something is “bad” when you mean it is good. (Note that I did not suggest that it is good to say that something is good by calling it bad.)

But it's creeping into almost every sort of conversation. It's not as bad as when those little blue cartoon characters called Smurfs replaced at least two words in every sentence with “smurf” but it could be approaching.

If you say something is cool and I agree that it is cool, what did we say? You could have said it was acceptable and I agreed that to be the case. You could have said it was excellent and I decided I could live with that. Or you could think it was awesome and I thought it was simply neat. Did we agree? It’s not clear.

But it’s cool.