pimp

[Thomas Paikeday]

Here is an interesting and intriguing item from today's paper:

WORD WATCH
Pimp: "White middle-class college students, secretaries, outdoor-sports
companies, chat-room denizens, T-shirt makers, all kinds of people who
have never had a thing to do with the sex trade and never would, have
co-opted the word 'pimp,' making it a synonym for 'cool,'" writes Lisa
Richardson in the Los Angeles Times. "Birthday presents are pimp, and
clothes are pimp.  Bikes are pimp, and cars are pimp."

What intrigues me is whether the new "cool" meaning of "pimp" is from
"pimp" as is generally understood or is it some dialectal or regional
word meaning something closer to the slang "cool." If so, how did this
meliorative semantic change come about? It doesn't look like a smooth
transition, as in the case of slang "cool" from the temperature sense.