Roots
Cool it
Deepti

SWINGING with the trend has always been important to the social animal and words to describe the authentic swingers keep appearing on the horizon. At one stage, ‘hep’ was one such word. If a teenager’s friends labelled him or her ‘hep’, the day was made. Later, ’ gave way to ‘hip’.

The origin of both words is not clear. While it is certain that they mean ‘trendy’, their root harks back to two theories. The first holds that both words are shortened forms of ‘hip, hip, hooray’ that is a communal cheer for appreciating anything remarkable.

The second links both words with the word ‘hippie’. In the 1960s, a hippie was a social rebel, a person who rejected conventional attitudes totally and was hence, a cult-figure for the youngster. An interesting explanation says that since hippies wore hip-hugging denims, hence they came to be ‘hip’.

While neither explanation holds water, they do point toward the way social ideas create vocabulary. At one point of time, in the 1980s, the word ‘cat’ was used for anyone who was faithful to the fashion of the time. ‘Cat’ came from the first letters of the Americanism ‘Casual American Teenager’. Later, the word ‘sexy’ took over.

But, so far as buzzwords go, the word ‘cool’ takes the cake. It has survived a very long voyage and still remains the ultimate compliment. In the 1300s, writers used it as a metaphor and as an indicator of temperature. Then, Shakespeare used ‘cool’ as a metaphor for the calming down of temper in Hamlet. By the 1700s, a woman was clever if she could ‘cool down’ a sexually ‘hot’ man. The 1800s was the era of the ‘cool customer’ and by the 1900s, a large amount of money was ‘a cool sum’. Then, along came expressions like ‘cool as cucumber’. In 1947, Charlie Parker’s number ‘Cool Blues’ arrived and musicians adopted ‘cool’ to describe whatever they appreciated. From here to the whole world of language was one small step and ‘cool’ came to be used for a range of feelings, activities, people and things.