Meaning of Cool

There's an entire page at Wikipedia on the meaning of "cool."  I think it misses something essential about it.

When I first became aware of it in the 1950s, cool seemed to emanate from the jazz world, then became applied to a certain Marlon Brando type: hip, with it, fashionable in a not necessarily fashionable way.  There were many ways to be cool, but sunglasses seemed to always come into it.

Lots of stuff was cool in the 50s, but cool cooled off in the 60s, to be replaced by "groovy," "fab," "fantastic" (pronounced "fun-tastic" in the British way) and so on. "Oh, wow!" was not cool but it replaced cool as a typical reaction among the frequently stoned.

But by the 80s cool was back, and it's been omnipresent for awhile now, having driven out nearly all competitors, at least over the long run.  By doing so it has acquired so many meanings to be almost meaningless except as an expression of approval.

But beneath and behind it all, it does mean something.  I'm willing to accept that jazz saxman Lester Young brought the word into multivarious slang use in the 1940s.  And that it might have African roots makes perfect sense, for it probably did originate among African Americans.

"Cool" would seem to refer to temperature, as opposed to hot.  That works for jazz, and perhaps in the McLuhan formulation for media.  But the meaning is not precisely about temperature in an important way.

Keeping your cool, being cool, is about not sweating.  That comes closer to what cool is actually about.  It's about not sweating.  And that doesn't necessarily have a direct relationship to the ambient temperature.

Keeping cool is most specifically about grace under pressure.  But still, there's a potent meaning beneath that one.  For there are people who can afford to keep cool.  That don't have to sweat it.

So who sweats?  People who do manual labor.  So who doesn't sweat?  People who don't have to do manual labor--which at the other extreme especially means rich people.  Since they are rich, they don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or being on time for their jobs, or whether they can keep their jobs or take care of their families.  They are free of the necessary activities and anxieties of the less than rich.

In communities where sweaty labor is the standard, a cool guy may be somebody who has found some other way to make his money--which may be why gangsters and musicians were the first to be cool.  They didn't have to sweat it--they were in that sense like the rich.

The rich are always cool.  People who are "cool" look and act like they are rich. That's basically the meaning of cool.

It's all there in the 20th century handbook of rich and poor in America, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

"...Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor."