Were Cool, Mom and Dad Are Swell Basic Slang and Generationa.docx

We're Cool, Mom and Dad Are Swell: Basic Slang and
Generational
Shifts in Values
Moore, Robert L.
American Speech, Volume 79, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp. 59-
86 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
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American Speech, Vol. 79, No. 1, Spring 2004
Copyright © 2004 by the American Dialect Society
59
WE’RE COOL, MOM AND DAD
ARE SWELL: BASIC SLANG AND
GENERATIONAL SHIFTS IN VALUES
ROBERT L. MOORE

Rollins College
Not all slang terms are created equal. Though slang is
commonly
described as serving a variety of social and psychological
functions, it is not
generally noted that these different functions imply the
existence of differ-
ent categories of slang. This paper outlines one particular kind
of slang,
what I call basic slang, and identifies the functions that shape
its use and
longevity. To illustrate the significance of basic slang and the
semantic
structure that underlies it, I present here an extensive social and
historical
discussion of the basic slang terms swell and cool with attention
to their uses
in American speech from the 1910s to the present.
Briefly, a basic slang lexeme is a slang expression that emerges
when a
young generation or cohort takes on a set of values starkly
opposed to the
values of its elders and begins to use a positive slang expression
that is
semantically linked to its new value orientation. It differs from
most slang
in that it typically endures for one or more generations, is used
pervasively,
and is applied to a wide array of referents as a general term of
approval.
The basic slang terms discussed here, swell and cool, can in
many contexts be
loosely glossed as meaning ‘good’. But in addition to this broad
applicabil-

ity, both swell and cool have core referents, namely, the values
adhered to by
the young generation that distinguish them from their elders.
These basic
slang terms are subtypes of what Flexner (1975) calls a
counterword, an
expression whose meaning has expanded to a broader and more
general
applicability than that of the term’s original referent.
It is the special semantic structure of counterwords that makes
them
particularly appropriate as basic slang terms and helps account
for their
unique qualities: that is, their endurance over long periods not
merely in
occasional use, but as pervasively used slang expressions whose
main func-
tions are (1) to express approval and (2) to align the speaker
with an
attitude or set of values characterizing his or her generation.
The slang
terms cool and swell and the attitudes that comprise their core
meanings
allow their users to employ them tirelessly for decades and not
“wear them
out,” because those who use them in their heyday never tire of
identifying
themselves with the values they represented. Counterwords that
serve as
american speech 79.1 (2004)60
basic slang terms illustrate a kind of semantic extension, a

structural
phenomenon outlined in detail in Kronenfeld’s 1996 study,
Plastic Glasses
and Church Fathers.
Though ephemerality is one of the most commonly cited
defining
features of slang, basic slang terms are not ephemeral. Swell
lasted in this
role from about 1920 to 1965, and cool began to take its place
during the
1950s and 60s, almost completely superseding it by about 1967.
Cool
continues to endure as a widely used positive counterword in
2004.
DATA AND METHODS
I first identified swell and cool as terms deserving special
attention when my
interest in movies of the 1930s and 1940s brought to light the
extraordi-
nary and enduring pervasiveness of the term swell in that era.
At about the
same time I began to notice (with the help of my young
daughter and her
friends) that children born in the 1980s (i.e., the offspring of
the 1960s
generation) were using cool as their most pervasive term of
approval. These
two terms seemed, each in its own era, to defy the common
understanding
of slang as short-lived. Though it’s true that exceptions to
slang’s ephemer-
ality have been widely noted—Chaucer’s bones ‘dice’ is the
standard ex-

ample—to my knowledge it has never been noted that certain
slang terms
are not only enduring but at the same time more pervasive than
all their
rivals. The very idea that a pervasively used slang term could
endure for
generations seems to contradict a fundamental feature thought
to charac-
terize slang, namely its being striking and interesting by virtue
of its
freshness.
I began to collect data on swell and cool by systematically
watching films
and reading such texts as published letters, fiction and
nonfiction from the
1950s and earlier. For the 1960s to the present I supplemented
these
sources with various others including television programs,
popular periodi-
cals, and ordinary conversation. The dedication signatures in
high school
and junior high school yearbooks from the 1960s and early
1970s proved
particularly revealing of the swell-to-cool transition that
occurred at that
time. I also consulted the Oxford English Dictionary (OED2
1989) and other
references with historical data. Finally I collected data on the
Chinese slang
term ku (derived from English cool) during my fieldwork in
Qingdao in
1993 and 1994 and in Beijing in 1998 and 2000.
Having collected a substantial body of data consisting of
incidents of

swell and cool in fictional dialogue, advertising copy, and
natural discourse
(written or oral), I then reviewed this material specifically
looking for the
Basic Slang and Generational Shifts in Values 61
referents that swell and cool most commonly designated.
Finally, in order to
identify their core meanings, I analyzed the uses to which these
key terms
were put and the contexts in which they were most commonly
used.
SLANG DEFINITIONS
Recent linguistic work has refined our understanding of the
notoriously
slippery concept of slang. Finegan (1994, 373), for example,
defines slang
as a variety of speech “used in situations of extreme
informality, often with
rebellious undertones or an intention of distancing its users
from certain
mainstream values.” And according to Eble (1996, 116) three of
the most
typical functions of slang are to express informality, identify
group mem-
bership, and oppose established authority. Drake (1980) also
sees slang as
both creating distance (i.e., from social norms) and promoting
solidarity
for members of a group.

Chapman (1986), emphasizing what he calls the individual
psychology
of slang, characterizes the attitudes of members of subcultures
in which
slang particularly flourishes. The use of slang within such
groups “is simul-
taneously an act of featuring and obtruding the self within the
subcul-
ture—by cleverness, by control, by up-to-dateness, by
insolence, by virtuosi-
ties of audacious and usually satirical wit, by aggression” (xii–
xiii). However,
focus on the subcultures of slang fails to explain why slang is
widely used in
mainstream society. In fact basic slang is probably used as
much within
mainstream society as among subcultures, but its usage still
conveys a
somewhat subversive message.
In Dumas and Lighter (1978), the definition of slang receives a
particu-
larly systematic treatment. Slang here is defined as any
expression that
meets at least two of the following criteria (paraphrased):
1. It lowers the dignity of formal or serious speech or writing.
2. Its use implies the user’s familiarity either with the referent
or with the less
statusful or less responsible class of people who have such
special familiarity
and use the term.
3. It is a tabooed term in ordinary discourse with persons of
higher social

status or greater responsibility.
4. It is used in place of the well-known conventional synonym,
especially in
order to (a) protect the user from the discomfort caused by the
conven-
tional item or (b) protect the user from the discomfort or
annoyance of
further elaboration.
The first of these criteria is identified as being central, if not
crucial, to
slang. Subsequent work by Lighter develops the idea of slang as
standing in
opposition to dignity. In the introduction to the Random House
Historical
Dictionary of American Slang, Lighter (1994, xii) writes:
The use of slang undermines the dignity of verbal exchange and
charges discourse
with an unrefined and often aggressive informality. It pops the
balloon of pretense.
There is often a raw vitality in slang, a ribald sense of humor
and a flip self-
confidence; there is also very often locker-room crudity and
toughness, a tawdry
sensibility.
In his essay on slang in The Cambridge History of the English
Language, Lighter
(2001, 220) writes:

Slang denotes an informal, nonstandard, nontechnical
vocabulary composed chiefly
of novel-sounding synonyms (and near synonyms) for standard
words and phrases;
it is often associated with youthful, raffish, or undignified
persons and groups; and
it conveys often striking connotations of impertinence or
irreverence, especially
for established attitudes and values within the prevailing
culture.
These definitions all have one trait in common: they define
slang in
terms of an extensive list of traits. Though the work of Lighter
and others
has significantly clarified our understanding of slang in context
and with
reference to historical trends, further advances can be made if
we move
beyond definitions that depend on trait lists and beyond
lexicons that
simply list slang terms. English slang expressions are,
obviously, part of the
English language, and as such they can be organized according
to discern-
ible underlying semantic features and functions much as other
English
lexemes can. Studies over the past few decades have revealed
underlying
semantic structures in the vocabulary of topics such as color
terminology
(Berlin and Kay 1969), furniture (Rosch 1978), birds (Boster
1988), and
drinking vessels (Kronenfeld 1996). A typical feature of these
semantic

fields is the varying salience and functional significance of the
terms that
comprise them. Some terms leap to mind more readily than
others (the
word chair, for example, is more quickly conjured up when
furniture is
mentioned than is grandfather clock), and semantic fields are
logically orga-
nized by such features. The existence of basic slang suggests
that slang
lexicons can be similarly organized, and the resulting structures
should
help unveil some of the varying functions that slang serves.
The affective impact of slang is one of its defining factors. But
affect
itself comes in different forms, as “aggressive informality,”
“raw vitality,”
“ribald sense of humor,” “flip self-confidence,” “locker-room
crudity and
toughness,” and “tawdry sensibility” in Lighter’s (1994)
description of
slang make clear. What basic slang does is serve a particular
affective
function, and, in doing so, it manages to remain fresh despite its
pervasive
use in countless contexts over a period of many years. No other
kinds of
affectively charged slang terms can make this claim.
BASIC SLANG: THE PROCESS

There is a general evolutionary sequence according to which
basic slang
terms emerge in mainstream usage. The process begins with a
term becom-
ing widely used to refer to a set of values that have special
appeal for a
generation of adolescents and young adults. These values will
include a
somewhat deviant or rebellious dimension that Dumas and
Lighter (1978)
associate with those relatively low in status or responsibility.
The set of
values serves as the core referent of the slang term, and the
enduring
quality of these values underlies the longevity of the basic slang
term for a
given generation. As this cohort matures the basic term
continues to be a
prominent part of its vocabulary and is likewise taken up by
those cohorts
that follow immediately in its tracks. The new term will endure
as a basic
slang expression until another dramatic shift in generational
values calls
forth a new term with which the new rebellious younger
generation identifies
itself and distinguishes itself from its elders. Though common
wisdom says
that every new generation rejects its parents’ values, in fact
important
generational rebellions have occurred only twice in the
twentieth century.
The first, coming after World War I, was represented by a
rejection of
various long-standing Victorian values (Allen 1952; Coben

1991); the
second youth rebellion reached its peak during the Vietnam War
and had
similarly dramatic long-term effects on American culture.
SWELL
Swell has had a career as a slang term lasting more than two
centuries. In
the late 1700s it was used as a noun referring to stylish young
men. Ellen
Moers (1960, 236) describes the “Heavy Swell” of London’s
1860s as the
“descendant of the Gent (via the Man About Town and the
Swell).”
The swell, whether heavy or ordinary, was defined mainly by
his dress,
his manners, and the people with whom he socialized. Swell
continued to
refer to prominent young men well into the twentieth century,
particularly
in Britain and somewhat less commonly in the United States. Its
meaning
eventually expanded to include any young male not in the
working class.
Swell was used as an adjective as early as 1812, according to
the OED2, to
describe not only stylish young swells but things associated
with them and
with their elegant ways. In that year James Hardy Vaux defined
the word

swell in his lexicon of the flash language, or underworld slang,
as follows:
“Any thing remarkable for its beauty or elegance, is called a
swell article; so,
a swell crib, is a genteel home.” And Byron wrote in Don Juan
in 1823 of a
man “So prime, so swell [note gentlemanly] so nutty and so
knowing” (canto
11, xix; brackets in the OED2 citation).
In Roughing It, Mark Twain (1871) has two gold prospectors
dreaming
of the trip they will take when they strike it rich, a trip that will
last three
years and will take them “everywhere.” The conversation
concludes thus:
“Won’t it be a swell trip!”
“We’ll spend forty or fifty thousand dollars trying to make it
one, anyway.”
[provided by Jonathan E. Lighter]
Beginning in the 1890s swell shifted its meaning in American
English
to refer to things without genteel or elegant qualities. Stephen
Crane’s The
Third Violet (1897, 44), for example, includes the sentence,
“You don’t look
as though you had such a swell time” (cited in OED2).
Also, George Ade’s various characters use the term swell in this
general-
ized sense, as in the following (provided by Jonathan E.
Lighter):

“Don’t it kill you dead to see a swell girl—you know, a real
peach—holden’ on
to some freak with side whiskers.” [1896, 5]
“How are you feeling this morning?”
“Swell and sassy.” [1903, 72]
Yet at around the turn of the century swell was still most
commonly used
to designate fancy, upper-class establishments, as in these
examples from
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900):
It was a truly swell saloon, with rich screens, fancy wines, and
a line of bar
goods unsurpassed in the country. [33]
The finest resort in town. It’s a way-up, swell place. [71]
It seems that, as will be shown in the case of cool from the
1930s to the
mid-1960s, swell for decades was not widely used as a term of
approval in
mainstream society, but was more or less marginalized. From
the contexts
in which it occurs as a counterword, or at least a generally
applicable term,
from the 1890s on to World War I, its seems to have been either
confined
mainly to characters who lived on the edge of respectable
society, or
employed by writers who wanted to highlight their characters’
lack of
gentility. Ade was unusual in the extent to which he gloried in
the use of

slang, and in The Third Violet Crane used unrefined speech to
emphasize the
humble backgrounds of his characters.
The most dramatic shift in the usage of swell occurred around
the time
of World War I when it began to be widely used as a
generalized term of
approval by the members of the younger generation, even
among the
middle and upper classes. At this time it most often referred to
activities
that defied the Victorian conventions of the older generation.
The middle-
class American Victorian cultural system of that era
prominently included
the values of earnestness, propriety, and prudishness. In matters
of sexual-
ity, particularly for women, the expectation was that young
people would
behave with restraint. Discreet sexual play was acceptable only
between
those who were planning or at least seriously considering
marriage and was
justified only in the context of a passionate love that had
spiritual reso-
nance (Lystra 1989).
But around the time of World War I a new attitude linked to a
more
liberal model of propriety was gaining ground among the
younger genera-

tion. The overt justification for this model was its modernity,
but it may
have enjoyed widespread acceptance among the middle class at
least partly
because people of this class felt secure in their status on the
basis of racial
and ethnic distinctions. Previous generations in both the British
and the
American middle classes had insisted on sexual restraint as a
key indicator
of female respectability. But by World War I the American
middle class,
unlike that in Britain, was distinguishable from the working
class in that the
latter consisted overwhelmingly of people who were not white,
Anglo-
Saxon, and Protestant. The guarantee of middle-class status for
many
young Americans, based on what were perceived as immutable
ethnic
distinctions vis-à-vis the Italians, Irish, blacks, and others in
the working
class, made sexual restraint less important as a class identifier
than it had
been in the past. This racially and ethnically based security
among young
middle-class Americans, along with the prosperity of the 1920s,
very likely
contributed to the rebellious rejection of Victorian standards
concerning
sexual restraint. Young middle-class Americans of the 1920s
accepted light
sexual play for both men and women and considered the casual,
somewhat
dispassionate, attitude toward sexuality that lay behind it more
modern and

generally superior to the Victorian style. The “petting party”
was one newly
overt and central feature of the 1920s youth culture that
highlighted this
attitude (Coben 1991; Stearns 1994).
The slang term swell, whose emerging preeminence paralleled
the rise
of this modern and somewhat hedonistic 1920s youth culture,
took root
and eventually became the single most widely used slang term
of approval
through the 1920s, and the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.
By habitually using this term, young people signaled their
willingness
to rebel or deviate a bit from convention and to explicitly
distance them-
selves from the old Victorian model of earnestness, propriety,
and righ-
teous passion. This rebellion lies at the heart of what historian
Peter
Stearns (1994, 172) calls “the new culture” that began to
emerge in the
1920s, a culture he describes as self-consciously modern in its
opposition to
Victorian values. The break between the values of the basically
Victorian
older generation and the rebellious “flaming youth” (as they
were then
commonly labeled) was an important source of generational

identification.
Whoever used the slang term swell was saying, in effect, “I
want the world to
know that I am the kind of young man or woman who goes to
jazz clubs and
indulges in petting parties.”
Swell in the 1920s was used most often in connection with fun-
filled or
sexually charged situations such as parties. In a 1917 letter,
Ernest
Hemingway writes from Europe to his family back home in
Missouri:
We have been having a swell lot of fun down here with a new
fellow named
Johnson who is about Baby Dales [sic] speed and we have sure
pulled some
rare ones on him. [1981, 3]
By the mid-1920s the term appears frequently in
correspondence. John
Dos Passos writes in a 1928 letter from the Soviet Union to E.
E. Cummings:
. . . things in these parts are pretty darn swell. . . . [1973, 386]
In a 1929 letter to an aunt, Dawn Powell writes:
I wrote you telling you how much I liked those swell little
pants, but I never
sent it. [1999, 70]
Also, in a passage in his epic novel U.S.A., Dos Passos (in one
of numerous
uses of this lexeme) has a young working-class character think

to himself
that he:
. . . wished he had a swell looking suit and a swell looking girl
to walk with.
[1929, 20]
Another example comes from the 1928 movie The Crowd, where
the term is
used in a lyric sung by a young newlywed:
Wife and I are happy
And everything is swell
It’s heavenly inside our flat
But outside it is El
The 1930 film Children of Pleasure features a conversation
between two men
where one, with reference to a woman, says to his companion,
“I got a swell
number for you.” In fact by the 1930s, the term swell is so
widely used in
Hollywood movie dialogue that it is more difficult to find
movies where it is
absent than those in which it occurs. It is by then clearly the
most perva-
sively used slang term of approval in American English and no
longer just
among the younger generation. The young post–World War I
generation
of the 1920s that picked up this term as a symbol of its modern

attitude
continued to use swell even as it left its years of flaming youth
behind. Also
paralleling the rise of swell and its establishment as the
thematic slang term
of this generation was the rise of dating as a form of recreation
among the
middle class. This modern institution, along with the necking or
sexual
play it typically entails, has endured as a part of middle-class
American
youth culture since around 1920 (Bailey 1988).
In Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in Chicago Streets (1932), the
first book in
James T. Farrell’s 1930s trilogy on the life of his fictional
Chicago working-
class youth Studs Lonigan, swell is used repeatedly to describe
a variety of
people, things, and events encountered by the protagonist. No
other slang
term of approval is used with nearly the frequency of swell,
though a few
comparable words like jake appear once or twice. A close
review of the uses
of swell in this popular novel reveals its connection to
situations whose most
characteristic quality is ‘fun’ and which often entail youthful
heterosexual
interactions. Almost all of the 28 occurrences of the term swell
in this
narrative are voiced either by Studs himself or by one of the
other adoles-
cents in his gang.
Farrell’s most common usage of swell (8 of the 28) occurs in

contexts
or situations linked to the pleasure of female company. As Studs
develops a
crush on his friend Lucy he finds himself speculating that he
would enjoy
. . . calling for Lucy and taking her out stepping to White City,
having a swell
time. [56]
It was all-swell to kiss Lucy, and it was different from a game
where she had to
kiss him, and everybody was kissing everybody else. [93]
A friend of Studs’s speculates about how “swell” it would be if
women all
wore revealing bathing suits (116), and another friend, to his
irritation,
describes Studs’s girlfriend as a “swell order of pork chops”
(150).
The second most typical kind of reference for swell in the
Farrell novel
is to fun or otherwise enjoyable situations (5 of the 28). For
example,
spending a day at the beach on the shore of Lake Michigan and
sitting
around and talking with his friends are both described as swell.
Also
described as swell are situations in which some kind of
advantage is gained
in social relations, as when Studs imagines how swell it would
be to criticize
a snooty girl if her virtue were known to be compromised, or
when he
contemplates how swell it is to be regarded as a tough guy,

having beaten up
his primary gang rival. Candy and tobacco are also described as
swell, as are
a skilled singer and the father of one of Studs’s friends who is
admired
because he seems to understand and sympathize with the boys.
The most
abstract application appears when one of Studs’s friends
speculates that it
would be swell “if we didn’t have to die” (121).
Swell then is linked to the new anti-Victorian values in that it is
most
commonly applied to young, likable, and fun-loving people and
to the
situations, particularly parties, where such people are likely to
be encoun-
tered. The timing of its appearance and its rapid expansion
during the
1920s in tandem with the rapid expansion of the casual, fun-
focused youth
culture and the dating-for-pleasure complex that the middle
class popular-
ized at this time point to a semantic link between the term and
the new anti-
Victorian attitude.
Of course since swell ’s popularity entailed its conversion into a
counterword, beginning in the 1920s almost anything positive
could be
called swell. In the films of this era and the writings of such

popular authors
as John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell, swell easily
outdistances all other
positive slang expressions in its breadth of application, serving,
in fact, as
the slang equivalent of the word good. But it differs from good
in an
important way: it is used to refer to people and things that are
directly
pleasing but is not used in reference to abstract moralistic
qualities or
things that are good in the sense of being approved by
established authority
figures. That is, young Studs Lonigan would not be likely to say
something
like this: “It was swell the way Father Donahue made me say six
Hail Marys
this morning. It shows he really cares about me.” This kind of
usage would
align the term with the authorities and the formal moral order
that swell, as
a slang term, implicitly opposes. That is, in accordance with
Lighter’s
(2001, 220) portrayal of slang, swell in its heyday conveyed
“striking conno-
tations of impertinence or irreverence, especially for established
attitudes
and values within the prevailing culture.”
According to Malcolm Cowley (1934, 65), the values and
institutions of
the new youth culture of the 1920s (that he links to Greenwich
Village’s
influence) was in decline as a form of bohemian rebelliousness
in the
1930s because the entire country had begun to accept its style:

It was dying because women smoked cigarettes on the streets of
the Bronx, drank
gin cocktails in Omaha and had perfectly swell parties in Seattle
and Middletown.
But though the 1920s youth culture style may have seemed less
bohe-
mian by the 1930s, the somewhat rebellious connotations of it
and its
leading slang term endured at least into the 1950s. The
deviant/rebellious
feature of swell can be seen in some examples drawn from
fictional dia-
logue. In the following excerpt from Young Lonigan, Studs’s
working-class
father is conversing with the pompous Mr. Gorman who wants
to brag
about his daughter but does not appreciate her being described
as “swell.”
“Oh! It was excellent. Excellent. Did you hear my daughter
rendering a
selection from Mozart and a nocturne from Sho-pan?”
“She was swell. I liked her,” said Lonigan.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that she was precisely swell; but I do
believe, I do
believe that she interpreted the masters with grace, charm,
talent, verve and

fire,” said Mr. Dennis P. Gorman. [43]
In Meredith Willson’s 1957 play The Music Man (known today
mainly in the
1962 film version), Professor Harold Hill warns parents about
the wayward
tendencies of their children:
“Mothers of River City. Heed that warning before it’s too late.
Watch for the
telltale signs of corruption. The minute your son leaves the
house, does he
rebuckle his knickerbockers below the knees? Is there a nicotine
stain on his
index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corn crib? Is he
starting to memorize
jokes from Captain Billy’s Whizbang? Are certain words
creeping into his
conversation, words like ‘swell’ and ‘So’s your old man?’”
As late as the 1950s swell continued to be regarded with
suspicion by
arbiters of propriety. In the I Love Lucy episode “Lucy Hires an
English
Tutor” (1952), Lucy and her friend Ethel are being coached by
Percy
Livermore, a specialist in diction, who warns the ladies that
there are two
words they should always avoid, “One of those is swell and the
other one is
lousy.” To which Lucy replies, “OK, what are they?”
To sum up, the emergence of a new basic slang term can be
summa-
rized as follows: a set of particularly appealing core attributes
(the core

referent) comes to be associated with a slang term. Being slang,
the term
necessarily suggests a degree of deviance or rebelliousness vis-
à-vis estab-
lished convention and implies a measure of individual
empowerment for
those who use it, those who, as Dumas and Lighter indicated,
are likely to
be of relatively low status. The values comprising the term’s
core referent,
being themselves approved of by the slang term users, render
the term
useful as a universal expression of approval, or a counterword.
Such a term,
when used, both expresses approval of its immediate referent
and signals a
degree of commitment to deviant, rebellious, or
antiauthoritarian values.
As will be discussed below, the antiauthoritarian nature of swell
is not easily
recognized by those who grew up after the World War II era
because the
emergence of cool eventually converted swell into a term
implying main-
stream benignity.
COOL : AFRICAN AMERICAN ORIGINS
A number of attempts to analyze cool have been undertaken in
recent years
by various scholars, journalists and writers (Majors and Billson
1992;

Danesi 1994; Stearns 1994; Connor 1995; Frank 1997; Pountain
and
Robins 2000; MacAdams 2001). Invariably these efforts have
noted the
difficulty of pinning this concept down and clarifying its
essential meaning.
A first step in reaching such a clarification, a step taken by
none of these
authors, is to note that cool is a counterword, and that therefore
anything
can be described as cool. This means that the core referent of
cool needs to
be distinguished from all of its other, derivative applications.
To identify
the core meanings of this term, I cite its most common
referents, especially
those referents alluded to by key participants in the jazz and
beat cultures
where the modern concept originated and in some of its
subsequent
transformations among mainstream youth in the 1960s.
Cool as a metaphor for emotional control and subdued
emotionalism
has deep roots and can even be seen as a kind of natural
metaphor. Certain
emotions, particularly anger, passion, and excitement, are
represented in
various cultures and historical eras as metaphorically hot.
Conversely the
use of cool to refer to a subdued or controlled emotional state is
both long-
lived and widespread. Rebhun (1999) refers to the hot-cold
dichotomy as a
metaphor for passionate versus dispassionate people in the
Pernambuco

region of Brazil. In Mandarin Chinese the word leng, which
literally means
‘cold’, metaphorically describes feelings and behaviors that
lack affection
or cordiality. In the nineteenth-century novel Little Women
(Alcott 1868,
168), the word cool in reference to emotional control sometimes
has a
negative connotation:
“Well, that’s cool,” said Laurie to himself, “to have a picnic
and never ask
me. . . .”
The OED2 lists a number of usages, some of them quite ancient,
in which
cool refers to dispassionate, relaxed, and calmly audacious
people. But it is
only in the 1930s in African American usage that the term cool
takes on its
unambiguously positive tone. Lighter’s (1994–) Historical
Dictionary cites
such early usages as the following from Zora Neale Hurston’s
collection
Mules and Men (1935, 33): “Many, you know Ah don’t go
nowhere unless
Ah take my box [guitar] wid me. . . . And what make it so cool,
Ah don’t go
nowhere unless I play it” (brackets and ellipsis in the
Dictionary citation).
The slang term cool that emerged in the 1930s elaborated on the
basic
metaphor of subdued emotion adding in particular the qualities
of
knowingness, detachment, and control. Knowingness, as a core

quality of
modern cool, refers to something more specific than mere
“knowledge.”
Knowingness implies a kind of insider knowledge, access to
information
that the speaker is in some sense privileged to have. It is the
qualities of
knowingness, detachment, and control along with the
implication of rebel-
liousness that make up the original core referent of the modern
cool
concept and that distinguish modern cool from its less specific
predeces-
sors.
In his 1963 study of African American music, Leroi Jones (who
later
changed his name to Amiri Baraka) explained cool as follows:
The term cool in its original context meant a specific reaction to
the world, a
specific relationship to one’s environment. It defined an attitude
that actually
existed. To be cool was, in its most accessible meaning, to be
calm, even unim-
pressed, by what horror the world might daily propose. As a
term used by Negroes,
the horror, etc., might be simply the deadeningly predictable
mind of white
America. [213]

Jones defines being cool as being “calm, unimpressed [and]
detached.” A
variety of jazz originally associated with Miles Davis and his
ensemble came
to be referred to as cool, and the Miles Davis recordings of
1949 and 1950
are often referred to in jazz history as “The Birth of the Cool.”
The subdued
and cerebral style of Davis’s group parallels the features of
knowingness
and detachment that are more generally associated with being
cool in
African American culture.
A number of authors besides Leroi Jones have noted the
important
function of the “cool pose” in African American culture as a
defense
mechanism against white racism (Majors and Billson 1992;
Connor 1995;
MacAdams 2001). This pose—that of the knowing, self-
sufficient, and
detached individual—is the original core referent of cool, and it
served the
mainly white Beat generation writers in much the same way as
it had served
their African American predecessors.
BEAT COOL
Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes helped
popularize
the term cool throughout the 1950s. These authors and their
circle, de-
scribed by Norman Mailer (1959) as “white negroes,” included
figures like

Gary Goodrow, whom MacAdams (2001, 20) describes as a
1950s hipster
active in New York’s Living Theater. According to Goodrow,
“to be cool was
to be in charge, unfazed by the bullshit of life. . . . The outward
signs of cool
had everything to do with an appearance of easy competence. . .
. To be
cool was to be not frantic, not overblown.” Furthermore,
according to
Goodrow, many of the “life-affirming” features of black
American culture
lay at the heart of cool: “like jazz, like relaxation, like general
enjoyment of
life outside the commercial pressure cooker. Any white who felt
a healthy
disgust for the ridiculous society around him gravitated in that
direction.”
One of the most detailed descriptions of the concept of cool by
a non–
African American writer is that of John Clellon Holmes in his
1952 novel Go
about the beat culture of New York. In the following passage
the protago-
nist, Hobbes, and his girlfriend are seated in a jazz club near a
table where
a newly arrived threesome sits. Hobbes had been trying to
explain “what
was suggested by the term ‘cool’ as hipsters used it.”

“When the music is cool, it’s pleasant, somewhat meditative and
without
tension. Everything before, you see, just last year, was ‘crazy,’
‘frantic,’ ‘gone.’ Now,
everybody is acting cool, unemotional, withdrawn. . . . But,
look there, the guy
coming to that table is ‘cool’!”
And it was true. The man he indicated so perfectly epitomized
everything that
might conceivably be meant by the term that for ten minutes
Hobbes could not
take his eyes off him.
Wraithlike, this person glided among the tables wearily,
followed by a six-foot,
supple redhead in a green print dress, and a sallow, wrinkled
little hustler. . . . The
“cool” man wore a wide flat brimmed slouch hat that he would
not remove, and a
tan drape suit that seemed to wilt at his thighs. The stringy hair
on his neck
protruded over a soft collar, and his dark, oily face was an
expressionless mask. 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. . . .
. . . One imagined that if a waiter had come up and requested
him to remove
the hat, he might have slowly, with weary irritation, reached to
the holster under his
arm and fingered a chilly automatic. Some night, in this very
spot, when he had
sunken to the abysses of his droopy lassitude, he might have
pulled out his rod and
sullenly shot up the place out of sheer ennui. [209–10]
Several features of the cool character in Holmes’s sketch
illustrate impor-
tant aspects of this concept. First, the stylish hipster zoot suit
highlights the
role of fashion as an arena for the expression of cool. In the
world of the
urban hipsters and, later on, in the world of middle-class youth,
command
of fashionable clothing and grooming styles were important in
establishing
status. Stylishness can be linked to cool not only because
stylishness is good
(therefore cool in a broad sense) but also because stylishness is
based on a
kind of knowingness and knowingness is a core feature of cool.
In addition to the emotionally subdued quality of Holmes’s cool
hipster
are indications of his detachment from the world around him.
His lethargic

pace stands in contrast to the movement and the music that
surrounds him,
his face is “an expressionless mask,” and his eyes are invisible
beneath the
brim of his hat. More commonly the detachment of the cool one
from the
world is symbolically represented by sunglasses that hide the
eyes. Holmes’s
cool character is, of course, a male, and, though he does not
state this
overtly, cool in the 1940s and 50s was more prominently
associated with
males than with females. It might be said that a male African
American jazz
musician wearing sunglasses on an expressionless face is the
prototypical
image of the cool person.
Finally the imaginary burst of violence that Holmes describes in
which
the zoot suiter shoots up the jazz joint out of ennui draws
attention to the
element of self-sufficiency or control that is an enduring key
feature of the
cool individual. The picture drawn through this imagery is that
of a person
who barely moves, yet who is capable of dominating any
situation that
might arise. Thus emotional control expands conceptually to the
point
where it includes control in general. This image of the
individual who says
little, moves little, and expresses little, yet remains knowing
and in control
is central to the modern sense of cool.

Jack Kerouac’s (1957) novel On the Road, which the author
began
writing in 1951 (at about the same time as Holmes’s Go was
published)
offers some hints as to how the term cool was being used by the
Beats as a
generalized term of approval. In this novel Kerouac’s first uses
of cool refer
to the world of jazz:
The leader was a slender, drooping, curly-haired, pursy-
mouthed tenorman, thin of
shoulder, draped loose in a sports shirt, cool in the warm night,
self-indulgence
written in his eyes, who picked up his horn and frowned in it
and blew cool and
complex and was dainty stamping his foot to catch ideas, and
ducked to miss
others—and said, “Blow,” very quietly when the other boys
took solos. [238]
Later in the novel, Sal Paradise (representing the author) and
his buddy
Dean Moriarty are driving through northern Mexico, and here
they find
people and experiences also worthy of the adjective cool, but
with no
relationship to the world of jazz. At one point Moriarty
describes the older
Mexican men as “so cool and grand and not bothered by
anything” (278).
The works of white Beat authors like Holmes and Kerouac
illustrate the
emergence of the cool concept from the world of African
American jazz and

its representation in widely read works of fiction. The Beat
movement, with
its antiracist, anticapitalist, and antihypocrisy themes, was a
transmission
device that helped bring the slang term cool and its core
meaning from the
world of jazz to mainstream culture.
COOL : FROM BEAT CULTURE TO MAINSTREAM
Some traces of the gradual appearance of cool in the mainstream
world can
be found in movies of the 1950s and 1960s. The 1957 Elvis
Presley vehicle
Jailhouse Rock shows us the swell-to-cool shift in midstream,
as the Presley
character (Vince) alternates between the use of these two terms.
The
following exchange occurs at a restaurant where Vince is sitting
with his
girlfriend/agent, Peg:
peg: You might at least ask me what happened this afternoon.
vince: What happened this afternoon?
peg: I sold your record, that’s all.
vince (sarcastically): Swell. I can tear into a good steak.
In another scene Vince refers to his new friend Laurie as “a real
cool little
singer.” And he receives a fan letter that reads in part, “I saw
you on

television today singing from a jail and I thought you looked
real cool.”
The Las Vegas–based rat pack similarly straddles the swell/cool
divide in
American popular culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. Frank
Sinatra,
Dean Martin, and their pals are sometimes seen as the epitome
of early
mainstream cool in that they portray characters who are
competent, in the
know, and unconventional by virtue of being free of the
strictures of
domestic, middle-class milieus. Perhaps because they were
middle-aged by
then, cool is not prominent in their vocabulary, except in the
case of Sammy
Davis, Jr., the only African American in the group.
An important trend linked to the evolution of cool in the 1950s
was the
tendency for adolescents to see their elders as lacking in
authenticity and
sincerity. The popularity of J. D. Salinger’s (1951) The Catcher
in the Rye and
the James Dean film Rebel without a Cause (1955) is largely a
function of
their sympathetic depictions of adolescents who feel alienated
from adults.
Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in Catcher, condemns many of
the adults
in his world as phony, and Natalie Wood’s character in Rebel
repeatedly
praises those whom she believes to be sincere.
The Catcher in the Rye and Rebel without a Cause were the first

popular
vehicles to deal with post–World War II adolescent-adult
conflict with
sympathy for the adolescent point of view. Even though none of
the
characters in either of them used the term cool (and Caulfield
repeatedly
uses swell), these characters were early representations of types
that would
eventually be described by young Americans as cool. In fact,
the 1970s rock
group The Eagles (1974) produced a song titled “James Dean,”
which
featured the refrain “You were just too cool for school,” and
Dean’s portrait
adorns the cover of Pountain and Robins’s Cool Rules: Anatomy
of an Attitude
(2000).
The widespread alienation from adults that characterized
adolescents
in the 1950s facilitated their eventual acceptance of the African
American/
Beat term cool. By the 1960s cool for mainstream teen culture
came to be
linked to a posture of detachment from adult culture in general.
In other
words it served the antimainstream/antiauthoritarian role
parallel to the
role of swell in the 1920s. The values that American teenagers
at this time

were exposed to can be described as falling into two broad
categories: those
presented by the adult world that offered eventual economic
security
through hard, honest work and obedience to authority, and those
con-
trolled by the adolescents themselves in the milieu of the school
that were
linked to peer group prestige. This prestige or “popularity” was
largely a
function of sex appeal, a sense of style, and the capacity to
present oneself
as poised and in control. In some cases the “in control” factor
could be
enhanced by a demonstrated capacity to defy adult guidelines or
authority.
Some examples of dialogue from movies of this era suggest the
linkage
of the word cool to these peer-controlled adolescent values. In
the 1964 film
The World of Henry Orient, the 14-year-old protagonists (both
female) use the
newly popular slang term on two occasions. Once, when they
don Chinese
style hats in homage to the object of their crush, one of the girls
exclaims,
“They’re cool.” And, at the end of the film, once they have
abandoned their
fantasy crushes and are on the verge of plunging into the world
of real
dating, one reacts to the other’s new use of make-up by saying,
“Cool!”
In The Sandpiper (1965), the beatnik artist played by Elizabeth
Taylor

tells her nine-year-old son that she will visit his school on
Charter Day. The
son replies, “You will? Man that will be cool. I mean when you
walk in and
all the guys see how pretty you are.”
In all of these cases the slang lexeme cool is linked to
adolescent status
hierarchies and crushes rather than the more sober values of the
adult
world.
SWELL TO COOL SHIFT
Further evidence of the mainstream shift in slang usage in the
1960s comes
from signatures in secondary school yearbooks, a total of 13
such books
providing the data in table 1. Typical signatures included the
following
phrases:
It certainly has been swell having you in my English class
[1964]
Best of luck to a swell copy editor [1965]
We’ve got some cool times ahead! [1964]
Best of wishes to a real cool guy. [1964]
Always remember the cool times we had with Mr. Wukovitz.
[1965]
To a real neat and nice, cool, great, average good girl. [1969]
The 1967–71 yearbook signatures suggest that by the late 1960s

swell
was dead among American adolescents. The signatures in these
later
yearbooks did not include a single use of swell, but had 12
references to cool,
3 of them in the phrase keep (it) cool, 7 referring to a cool
person/kid, and 2
referring to cool times, as in “This year has really been cool.”
Despite the
small size of this sample, it does demonstrate that by 1964 cool
was a regular
part of adolescent discourse and was being used in some
contexts much as
swell had been used earlier. Furthermore, the inverted pattern,
swell declin-
ing in use as cool expands, points to the common function these
terms
served and hints that only one was likely to survive in the role
of a widely
used, broadly positive counterword. There is, it might be said,
room for
only one basic slang term for any given generation.
Further evidence for the special prominence of cool in post-
1967 youth
cultures can be found in the work of Dumas and Lighter (1978),
Labov
(1992), and Eble (1996). Labov notes the breadth of cool’s
popularity
among various subgroups of youth and even uses cool as a
defining term for
table 1
Occurrences of swell and cool in Student Signatures in
Yearbooks for the Classes

of 1962–68 and 1971 from Public Secondary Schools in
Lakeland, Florida;
New Milford, New Jersey; Mariemount, Ohio; and Tucson,
Arizona
Number of Number of cases
occurrences of swell occurrences of cool
1960 8 0
1961 3 0
1962 6 0
1963 5 0
1964 1 2
1965 1 1
1966 2 0
1967 0 3
1968 0 3
1971 0 6
note: Thirteen yearbooks were reviewed, one for each of the
years listed, except
for 1960, 1967, and 1968, each of which was represented by two
yearbooks.
other positive slang terms, while Eble’s work highlights cool’s
longevity and
its broad applicability.
It might be argued that the “cool” values that emerged in the
1950s
and 1960s represented nothing more than a continuation of the
“swell”

values of previous generations. The concepts share an anti-
Victorian atti-
tude that holds sternness and prudery at bay while signaling a
measure of
rebelliousness in the highly informal quality of their
representative terms.
Given that a swell time in 1925 might amount to the same thing
as a cool time
in 1965, it could be argued that all cool ultimately did was to
overthrow swell
and take its place.
But a crucial difference in the core referents is that cool, unlike
swell,
implies a quality of knowingness that is not only leery of
conventional
prudery but regards it and other conventional values as phony
and hypo-
critical. The distrust toward conventional standards and
authority figures
implied by the term cool is much more pointed than anything
suggested by
its predecessor, swell. And linked to this central quality of
knowingness for
cool are the other original qualities of detachment, emotional
calm, and
control, qualities that were not evoked by swell. They were
originally associ-
ated with cool in African American culture and continued to be
associated
with it in mainstream youth culture.
SWELL BECOMES CORNY
As cool became the basic slang term of a generation that strove
to distin-

guish itself from its predecessors, swell came to be
reinterpreted as extraor-
dinarily uncool. Its bad boy image, referred to by Meredith
Willson, James
T. Farrell, and Lucy’s diction coach, was gone. Swell assumed a
place in the
youth culture’s semantic universe opposite to cool; suddenly
swell meant
‘corny, square’.
The decidedly unhip quality acquired by swell is starkly
dramatized in
the 1985 brat pack movie The Breakfast Club. In one scene in
this film the
cool hoodlum character ridicules the nerdy good boy by
depicting the
latter’s home life as hopelessly naive, concluding with a mock
dialogue
between the nerd’s parents that ends thus:
“Dear, isn’t our son swell?”
“Yes, Dear. Isn’t life swell?”
Cool not only took on the broadly positive role of a cohort
counterword
for the baby boomer generation, but then, Oedipus-like,
proceeded to kill
swell with contempt. As of the late 1960s swell had become the
perfect
lexeme for mocking the unhip. This is in spite of the fact that
the affable

sociability so characteristic of the swell young moderns of the
1920s, is also
a prominent feature of contemporary cool college students.
Another passage that marks the generational shift indicated by
the
succession of these two terms is the following passage from
Mary Rodgers’s
1972 adolescent novel, Freaky Friday:
My parents told him he was welcome to come back anytime, and
he said how
about tomorrow. We all said that would be swell. (Actually, my
father said swell,
mother said lovely, and I said cool. . . .). [144]
Swell has come to be regarded not only as an indicator of
naïveté, but
also of a corny sort of earnest enthusiasm, as in this quote from
a Leonard
Maltin minireview of the 1952 film The Greatest Show on
Earth:
Big package of fun from DeMille complete with hokey
performances, cliches,
big-top excitement, and a swell train wreck. [Maltin 1998, 541]
Swell, in other words, by the late 1960s, had acquired
connotations of being
out of the loop, earnest, naive, and foolishly excitable. These
features put it
in direct opposition to the core meaning of cool with its
implications of
detachment, knowingness, and emotional control. Of course
swell in its
heyday did not have these uncool connotations. It acquired them

by virtue
of its status as the basic slang term of the parental generation,
the genera-
tion against which the adolescent cool concept was directed
during the
counterculture of the late 1960s. In a kind of structural
transformation
that brings to mind Lévi-Strauss’s (1962) notion of oppositional
totemic
emblems being “good to think,” swell became conceptually
transformed
into the virtual opposite of cool.
A NEW KIND OF KNOWINGNESS: HIP CONSUMERISM
The middle-class youth of the late 1950s had learned from their
cool
predecessors, the Beats, to admire the hip and detached attitude
first
developed as a defense mechanism by African Americans. But
adolescent
cool was mainly a proclamation of rebellion against the older
generation
rather than against racism or exploitative capitalism, as it had
been for the
jazzmen and the beats. Of course the antiestablishment cool of
the 1950s
generation and the antiparental cool of 1960s adolescents do
overlap. After
all, the racist and otherwise dehumanizing institutions that the
original
cool rebels reacted against were controlled by adult authority
figures, the
same figures from whom adolescents sought to distance
themselves.

The growth of the counterculture among university students and
other
urban youth in the 1960s brought about a blending of two
streams of cool
consciousness. On one hand there was the sense of alienation
from the
parents’ generation as represented by James Dean and Holden
Caulfield.
Along with this came a growing awareness of the fissures in
American
society, specifically the conflicts between American ideals and
the realities
of racism, materialism, and political corruption. No doubt the
suspicions
already felt toward adult authorities by teenagers made it easy
for many to
slip into political opposition against the same capitalistic and
militaristic
institutions that their Beat predecessors in the 1950s had
denigrated.
But the concept of cool among 1960s youth exhibited some
interesting
convolutions. Thomas Frank (1997), in The Conquest of Cool:
Business Cul-
ture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism,
describes the process
whereby clever advertising agencies portrayed their clients as
cool by slyly
mocking the phoniness and pretentiousness of traditional ads.
These hip
ad designs struck a chord in the youth of the 1960s. But

ironically the
young Americans who bought into Volkswagen’s hip and
knowing ads,
though feeling cool and detached as they did so, were being
seduced by the
cleverness of the capitalist establishment. The fact that a
Madison Avenue
ad agency could successfully strike a cool pose is one indication
that the
concept of cool among mainstream youth had changed from its
original jazz
world significance. One result of this transformation was the
correlation of
cool with success, a correlation that was not characteristic of
the cool origi-
nally described by Leroi Jones.
RECENT TRENDS: COOL WINNERS
The two-tiered structure of the term cool, with its core referent
and its
secondary applicability to virtually anything, is revealed in the
tendency for
cool to be more commonly applied to some kinds of people and
things than
to others. The referents that are more likely to be so labeled are
semanti-
cally linked to the aforementioned core features of emotional
control,
detachment, knowingness, and deviance from the mainstream.
Pountain and Robins, for example, describe cool as “an
oppositional
attitude adopted by individuals to express defiance to authority .
. . [which]
conceals its rebellion behind a mask of ironic impassivity”

(2000, 19).
A particular kind of knowingness that is often described as cool
is that
which is up to date not in fashion but in technology. In fact the
expression
cool is widely used in contexts related to software use and
development.
Fred Moody (1995, xl), in his account of his “year with
Microsoft on the
multimedia frontier,” writes that cool at that corporation’s
headquarters
could have any of the following meanings:
perfect, phenomenal, awesome, ingenious, eye-popping, bliss
inducing, pretty,
clever, enchanting, fine, adequate, acceptable, okay, or any of
hundreds of
other such words.
Of course Moody’s description simply emphasizes that cool is a
widely used
counterword. However, the fact that he chose to focus on this
particular
term in his discussion of language use at Microsoft highlights
the centrality
of this term in high tech contexts.
Knowingness as a feature of cool is also emphasized in contexts
that
refer neither to technology or style. The following dialogue is

from the
1996 Doug Liman movie Swingers:
“For some reason the cool bars in Hollywood have to be hard to
find and have
no sign. . . . It’s a speakeasy kind of thing. It’s kind of cool. It’s
like you’re in on
a secret.”
Another unsurprising feature of the cool concept is its
continuing
association with rebelliousness or deviance. This feature of cool
is empha-
sized in the following comments from teenagers interviewed in
the PBS
Frontline documentary The Lost Children of Rockdale County
(1999):
In reference to group sex: “She thought it was the coolest
thing.”
In reference to drinking alcohol: “When you’re that young you
do it to be
cool.”
The following comment by a 10-year-old was noted in a
conversation in
1998:
She thinks she’s so cool because she’s in the advanced math
section. That’s not
what most kids think is cool. Cool has to do with being popular
and that kind
of thing.
In the Seinfeld episode “The Little Jerry” (1997), George
Costanza humor-

ously validates the cool quality of the social outsider or deviant
when, in a
conversation with an attractive prison librarian, he blurts out,
“You’re in
prison? That is so cool!”
Dalzell (1996, 126–27) tracks the history of the slang term cool
focus-
ing mainly on its emergence with bop musicians in the 1940s.
Like most of
those who attempt to explain this modern slang term, he finds it
unusually
“amorphous and ubiquitous.” The attributes that he emphasizes
parallel
those discussed above, as when he writes it came to be applied
to “detached,
cerebral, stylish hipsters, jazzmen and rebels,” but then notes
that it “quickly
began its surge towards a mainstream term of approval.”
Within the mainstream teenage world of the 1950s and 1960s,
adult
authorities in general were regarded with suspicion, and so cool
came to
refer to people and things distinctly separate from adult-
approved conven-
tions, particularly things and people that were prominent in
adolescent
prestige hierarchies. In effect, one of the most common
synonyms for the
popular crowd among adolescents was “the cool kids.” At the

same time the
adult world came to be viewed as both foolishly rigid (square,
as the
dominant anticool phrase of the 1950s had it), and hypocritical.
One of the
key transformations of the cool concept as it entered
mainstream use was its
gradual acceptance as referring to winners. In the jazz and Beat
worlds the
cool person was necessarily marginalized vis-à-vis the power
structure. The
very word Beat has semantic links to the notion of one who has
been beaten
down by the dominant society.
But for 1960s mainstream adolescents a person could win in the
power
struggle and still be cool, particularly if he or she managed to
project an
image that suggested authenticity, a laid-back quality, and a
willingness to
defy convention. So Bob Dylan and the Beatles, extraordinarily
successful
in the dominant capitalist arena, could still be viewed as cool
because their
work expressed a defiant anticonventional quality. The same
could be said
of Sean Connery, Paul Newman, and other performers who
portrayed
assertively individualistic and rebellious characters. As the
defiantly indi-
vidualistic cool figures of 1960s popular culture rose to
prominence,
previously popular figures who emphasized earnest propriety
quickly faded,
Pat Boone being perhaps the best-known example of this type.

This cool concept with its distrust of authority and admiration
for the
rebellious and unconventional lay at the heart of the 1960s
counterculture.
Why this confluence of attitudes brought about such dramatic
turmoil in
the late 1960s and not at some earlier or later date is a topic that
has been
discussed at length elsewhere. Obviously significant were the
self-confidence
enjoyed by a prosperous and increasingly well-educated youth
cohort as
well as the gross injustices and other horrors that television
coverage made
visible to this cohort in such areas as race relations and the
Vietnam War. Of
particular concern to the explanation offered here concerning
psychologi-
cal links to linguistic expression is that the emerging
counterculture em-
ployed a model that had been originally forged in a
marginalized African
American context, and, after modifying that model slightly,
made it a
central value complex for an entire generation. As that
generation has
grown up, it has held onto the basic slang term, borrowed from
African
American and Beat culture, by which it first identified itself as
distinct from

its predecessors.
The blend of the jazz/Beat version of cool with mainstream
adolescent
attitudes has resulted in a bifocal cultural model of cool. Both
foci share the
key features of knowingness, control, and deviance from
authority figures,
yet they are distinguished from each other in that one (closer to
the
original cool) includes the feature of subdued emotionalism
with implica-
tions of detachment, while the other emphasizes popularity and
affability.
The one link that this second focus has to the subdued
emotionalism of the
detached jazz and Beat worlds is the laid back factor.
INTERNATIONAL COOL
American style cool is now making itself felt in various
international youth
culture contexts. In 1999 I heard an 11-year-old monolingual
French-
speaking Swiss girl, while visiting her grandfather’s farm,
respond “Cool!”
when told she could help round up the calves to be trucked to
the
mountains. In fact this word is now widely used in various
European
countries.
And starting in the 1990s young urban Chinese in the People’s
Repub-
lic of China began using the word ku as a Mandarin rendering of
the

English slang term cool. Its meaning appears to be shifting as
different
aspects of international youth culture make themselves felt in
East Asia, but
one of its early connotations emphasized individualism. As a
26-year-old
university graduate from Shandong province wrote in a 1999 e-
mail mes-
sage, “[Ku] is rather a kind of style—new, independent,
unique—meaning
it is different from the classical, and different from the ordinary
yet in no
way low tasted” (Moore 2000).
CONCLUSION: BASIC SLANG AND THE CASE
FOR FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES IN SLANG LEXICONS
Basic slang typically arises within the context of a youth culture
and in its
earliest usage serves to highlight value differences between
young and old.
As the younger generation grows older, the term continues to be
widely
used as long as the values to which it is linked continue to be
embraced by
the rising cohort. This is the most plausible explanation for the
endurance
for decades of slang terms like swell and cool. It is not
plausible, after all, that
Americans suddenly began to use swell as their favorite slang
term in 1917,
and then just as suddenly dropped it in 1967 for no reason other
than they

were finally tired of it. Rather these linguistic shifts are
indicative of
positively valued emotional attitudes that can rise or fall rather
abruptly
and do so in the hands of those youthful cohorts that decisively
reject some
of their parents’ values.
The only word that might be compared to swell and cool in
terms of its
pervasiveness and endurance is okay, and okay’s status as a
slang term is
problematic. As Lighter and others have emphasized, slang
terms carry a
note of rebelliousness, a feature that okay lacks. If, for
example, in a highly
formal setting, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, a justice were
to respond to
a colleague’s comments by saying That’s good or Okay, little
would be made
of it. But the response That’s cool would certainly suggest
either irony or
inadequate respect for the established order. Cool, in other
words, is clearly
a slang term, while okay might better be classed as a colloquial
or informal
expression.
On the other hand, slang words like hip that can be described as
enduring lack the extremely broad applicability of cool and
swell. Hip is
limited in reference to a value, a kind of knowingness, that is a
core feature
of cool. However, unlike cool, hip is not routinely used as a

broadly applicable
term of approval. Hip, in other words, is slang but is not a
generalized term
of approval, while okay, though a broadly applicable term of
approval, is not
really slang.
The combined qualities of being pervasively used and used over
a great
length of time make basic slang distinctly different from other
slang terms,
some of which may be extensively used and then dropped,
others of which
may endure, but only by virtue of their being little used. The
key to basic
slang’s combination of pervasiveness and longevity is its link to
the speaker’s
identity. Speakers who utter the term cool suggest that they
understand and
approve of the attitude of knowingness, detachment, control,
and rebel-
liousness that comprises the core meaning of this term. Despite
being
widely used over a period of decades, the core value that cool
expresses is
still positively valued by the baby boom generation and the
cohorts follow-
ing it, and this core value gives this slang term its quality of
undiminished
freshness.
NOTES
I would like to thank Tom Dalzell, Connie Eble, Hill Gates,
David Kronenfeld,
Jonathan Lighter, and Leigh Ann Wheeler for their helpful

comments on an
earlier draft of this paper. Professor Lighter was also kind
enough to provide me
with material from his notes for the forthcoming volume 3 of
the Random House
Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994–).
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Read “We’re Cool, Mom and Dad are swell” while answering
the reading questions over this article.
Reading Questions over the ‘swell’ and ‘cool’ article
1. What’s the difference between basic slang words like ‘swell’
and ‘cool’ and what we normally think of when we think of
slang?
2. What do you think is the best definition of slang? Look at
the definitions offered in the reading and combine/modify them

if you want to.
3. What are the functions of slang?
4. What cultural values were conveyed by ‘swell’?
5. Why did ‘swell’ have such a long slang life?
6. When did ‘swell’ stop being used with its original basic
slang meaning? How did it come to be used after that (that is,
how is it used today)?
8. What connotations did ‘cool’ have as it became popular in
the 1930s and 1940s? Why is its use especially associated with
the African American community of that time?
9. What does the author argue is a key difference between the
meaning of ‘swell’ and ‘cool’?
10. What meaning does ‘cool’ convey today?
Also consider this question:
‘Slang’ and ‘cool’ were argued (I think effectively) to be basic
slang terms (cultural resonance, pervasiveness, longevity, broad
application). Can you propose any slang term since ‘cool’ that
would fit the category of basic slang? Be ready to make your
case in class.
Homework 2 Due on Tuesday, Sept 23. 5 pts
Present four new slang words in this format (1) give its part of
speech,(2) give its pronunciation (3) give a definition, (4) give
the word-formation process, and (5) give an authentic
example):
mansplain 1)(verb) (2) mænsplen(3)the act of a male explaining
to a female something that he assumes that she doesn’t already

know; done in a condescending manner
(4) word –formation process: blend of ‘man’ and ‘explain’
(5) Let Me Mansplain That Sports Illustrated Cover For You,
Little Lady!
Warnings: You may not make up a slang word. It has to be
popular to some degree, NOT just between you and your
brother/sister or best friend while you’re doing this homework
assignment. You should also not just go to urbandictionary.com.
A lot of those entries are just those words that someone and
their brother/sister or best friend use. Find or recall real uses of
the term.
1

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