Early Citations for "Cool"

[Jonathan Lighter]

My reaction to Hurston's usage is rather similar to Ben's.  It's as though "what makes it so cool" was idiomatic usage long before the appearance of the simple adjective "cool" (great).

In support of that interpretation, Hurston, as Ben points out, does not include "cool" in her slang-dense 1942 "Story in Harlem Slang," published just a few years before the public debut of "cool" in the lexicon of jazz.  Furthermore, the users of "what makes it so cool" in her works appear to be mostly from the rural Deep South and of an older generation.

All this may be nitpicking to the average person of good sense (cool is cool, right?). And maybe the evidence from Hurston is misleading.  But the absence of the simple word and the presence of only the phrase before the '40s is notable.

JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: Early Citations for "Cool"
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On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:14:33 -0400, Wilson Gray wrote:

>Ben, WRT "... the peculiar cleft construction 'what make it so cool'
>...," what makes this construction so "peculiar" to you? I've used it
>and its congeners just about since I've been able to speak what I
>thought was English. Yet, somehow, the peculiarity of it has escaped
>my notice over all these years. Apparently, my command of prescriptive
>English is far less than I've flattered myself that it is.

You're reading far too much into my use of the word "peculiar". I found it
peculiar not on any prescriptive grounds but because a) this is the *only*
construction in which Hurston used "cool" in a way that didn't have to do
with temperature or self-control (based on an exhaustive search of her
works), and b) I haven't seen a single citation for "what make it so cool"
from any of Hurston's contemporaries. So I simply meant that it's peculiar
*to Hurston*, at least in the pre-WWII era.

>And I seriously doubt that Hurston "favored" this construction. Rather,
>she merely wrote what she heard in her day and which I continue to hear
>and use in my day. I simply can not see anything about this
>construction that would make it sound "peculiar" to a speaker of any
>other dialect of English.

I don't doubt that she wrote "what make it so cool" because that's what
she heard in her travels. Hurston was a careful ethnographer when
recording the Floridian folklore of _Mules and Men_, and the dialogue in
her short stories and plays is no doubt based on natural AAVE
conversation. But I still find it odd that her use of "cool" in this
particular way (possibly continuous with the earlier "audacious" sense
and/or the later "excellent" sense) *only* appears in this particular
cleft construction, and not in anyone else's writings of the time.

>BTW, where did you learn your (native?) dialect of English?

Exotic west-central New Jersey. (Native speaker, mother from Michigan,
father from northern New Jersey.) As I've mentioned previously, I grew up
in the part of NJ that lacks the "short-a split", sandwiched between the
short-a-splitting NYC and Mid-Atlantic regions.


--Ben Zimmer


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