for many years have i searched, and now i find the definitive timeline of cool
to summarise – flappers stopped being cool 80 years ago, bebop was one of the few things to remain cool during world war II, and the only cool thing right now is dance/techno.
Nick Southgate writes that, although some notions of cool can be traced back to Aristotle, whose notion of cool is to be found in his ethical writings, most particularly the Nicomachean Ethics,[2] it is not confined to one particular ethnic group or gender.
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An early use for the word “cool” in such a context was Abraham Lincoln.
Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool.
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Cool as an elusive essence: According to this theory, cool is a real, but unknowable property. Cool, like “good”, is a property that exists, but can only be sought after. In the New Yorker article, “The Coolhunt”, cool is given three characteristics:
- “The act of discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on”
- “Cool cannot be manufactured, only observed”
- “[Cool] can only be observed by those who are themselves cool”.
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