the great "cool" debate

[Jonathan Lighter]

I'm with Ben.

JL

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 6:34 PM, Benjamin Zimmer <
bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: the great "cool" debate
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 6:04 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> >        A discussion has been raging since January in the TLS (formerly
> Times Literary
> > Supplement) on the history of the "contemporary sense" of the word
> "cool".  (There's
> > an antedating here for those who persevere to the end.)
> [snip]
> >        Finally, a letter from Allan Peskin contributes something of
> interest.  "In 1881,
> > President James A. Garfield's teenage daughter, Mollie, wrote to a friend
> about her
> > girlish crush on her father's private secretary, Joseph Stanley-Brown.
>  "Isn't he cool!
> > she gushed.  Considering that she would marry him as soon as she came of
> age,
> > she could hardly have been using "cool" to convey [impudent]."  This is
> presumably
> > OED's 8a (HDAS 2): sophisticated, stylish, which both dictionaries date
> to 1918 --
> > HDAS first item from the U. S is 1924.  HDAS's quotations from 1924, 1925
> & 1944
> > are all from black sources; its quotations from 1944 (2nd) and 1945 from
> military
> > sources.  Mollie must have been a cool chick.
>
> We have to take Peskin's word on this, since the only reference I can
> find to Mollie's letter is in Peskin's own biography of Garfield. We
> would, of course, want to know the context of Mollie's remark --
> without any further information, I don't see why this couldn't fall
> under OED's sense 2d ("assured and unabashed where diffidence and
> hesitation would be expected; composedly and deliberately audacious or
> impudent in making a proposal, demand, or assumption," from 1723). Why
> couldn't she have been impressed by her suitor's audacity?
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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