Early Citations for "Cool"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

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