In terms of slang, "cool" is still hot

NEW YORK — Groovy is over, hip is square, far out is long gone. Don't worry, though; it's cool.

"Cool" remains the gold standard of slang in the 21st century, as reliable as a blue-chip stock, surviving like few expressions in our constantly evolving language. It has kept its cool through the centuries.

How cool is that?

Way cool, say experts who interpret slang for messages about society.

"Cool is certainly a charter member for the slang hall of fame," says Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of popular culture. "Cool just sits back and keeps getting used generation after generation and lets the whole history of the language roll off its back."

Cool is the all-purpose word for OK, good, great, terrific and every gradation in between, often pronounced nowadays as "kewl."

Before it became slang, cool was, of course, a literal reference to temperature and later a favorite metaphor of writers as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1300s.

By the 17th century, the word helped define a woman's ability to allay a man's passion through sex. During the horse-and-buggy era, "cooling one's heels" described the need to rest a horse with overheated hooves. The 1800s saw the use of "cool off," meaning to kill, and the "cool customer."

Early in the 20th century, it was used to refer to large amounts of money: "a cool million." In the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge's White House campaign slogan was "Keep Cool With Coolidge." By the 1930s, "cool as a cucumber" was "the bee's knees," slang of the era for "excellent."

By the 1940s, cool gained popularity through its use in jazz clubs, where musicians employed a word that had enjoyed wide use among blacks.

The book "America in So Many Words" traces the modern use of cool to the 1940s. In 1947, the book notes, the Charlie Parker Quartet recorded "Cool Blues."

A year later, Life magazine titled an article "Bebop: New Jazz School Is Led by Trumpeter Who Is Hot, Cool and Gone." And in 1948, The New Yorker said "the bebop people have a language of their own ... Their expressions of approval include 'cool.' "

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, says the word should have faded away at the end of the '50s. Instead, it was adopted and redefined by hippies, followed by surfers, rappers and techno-geeks. "Click here for cool stuff," Web sites say.

Thompson says there is no reason to believe cool will go the way of linguistic dinosaurs such as "bad" (meaning good), or "chill" (meaning cool off) or "groovy," which sounds so "Brady Bunch."

"Cool is already firmly ensconced in several generations," he says. "It's got street cred. And it had street cred before we even used the word 'street cred.' "