READING A STORY AND ANSWER THE QUESTION

We're Cool, Mom and Dad Are Swell: Basic Slang and Generational Shifts in Values

Moore, Robert L.

American Speech, Volume 79, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp. 59-86 (Article)

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American Speech, Vol. 79, No. 1, Spring 2004 Copyright © 2004 by the American Dialect Society

59

WE’RE COOL, MOM AND DAD ARE SWELL: BASIC SLANG AND

GENERATIONAL SHIFTS IN VALUES

ROBERT L. MOORE Rollins College

Not all slang terms are created equal. Though slang is commonly described as serving a variety of social and psychological functions, it is not generally noted that these different functions imply the existence of differ- ent categories of slang. This paper outlines one particular kind of slang, what I call basic slang, and identifies the functions that shape its use and longevity. To illustrate the significance of basic slang and the semantic structure that underlies it, I present here an extensive social and historical discussion of the basic slang terms swell and cool with attention to their uses in American speech from the 1910s to the present.

Briefly, a basic slang lexeme is a slang expression that emerges when a young generation or cohort takes on a set of values starkly opposed to the values of its elders and begins to use a positive slang expression that is semantically linked to its new value orientation. It differs from most slang in that it typically endures for one or more generations, is used pervasively, and is applied to a wide array of referents as a general term of approval. The basic slang terms discussed here, swell and cool, can in many contexts be loosely glossed as meaning ‘good’. But in addition to this broad applicabil- ity, both swell and cool have core referents, namely, the values adhered to by the young generation that distinguish them from their elders. These basic slang terms are subtypes of what Flexner (1975) calls a counterword, an expression whose meaning has expanded to a broader and more general applicability than that of the term’s original referent.

It is the special semantic structure of counterwords that makes them particularly appropriate as basic slang terms and helps account for their unique qualities: that is, their endurance over long periods not merely in occasional use, but as pervasively used slang expressions whose main func- tions are (1) to express approval and (2) to align the speaker with an attitude or set of values characterizing his or her generation. The slang terms cool and swell and the attitudes that comprise their core meanings allow their users to employ them tirelessly for decades and not “wear them out,” because those who use them in their heyday never tire of identifying themselves with the values they represented. Counterwords that serve as

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basic slang terms illustrate a kind of semantic extension, a structural phenomenon outlined in detail in Kronenfeld’s 1996 study, Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers.

Though ephemerality is one of the most commonly cited defining features of slang, basic slang terms are not ephemeral. Swell lasted in this role from about 1920 to 1965, and cool began to take its place during the 1950s and 60s, almost completely superseding it by about 1967. Cool continues to endure as a widely used positive counterword in 2004.

DATA AND METHODS

I first identified swell and cool as terms deserving special attention when my interest in movies of the 1930s and 1940s brought to light the extraordi- nary and enduring pervasiveness of the term swell in that era. At about the same time I began to notice (with the help of my young daughter and her friends) that children born in the 1980s (i.e., the offspring of the 1960s generation) were using cool as their most pervasive term of approval. These two terms seemed, each in its own era, to defy the common understanding of slang as short-lived. Though it’s true that exceptions to slang’s ephemer- ality have been widely noted—Chaucer’s bones ‘dice’ is the standard ex- ample—to my knowledge it has never been noted that certain slang terms are not only enduring but at the same time more pervasive than all their rivals. The very idea that a pervasively used slang term could endure for generations seems to contradict a fundamental feature thought to charac- terize slang, namely its being striking and interesting by virtue of its freshness.

I began to collect data on swell and cool by systematically watching films and reading such texts as published letters, fiction and nonfiction from the 1950s and earlier. For the 1960s to the present I supplemented these sources with various others including television programs, popular periodi- cals, and ordinary conversation. The dedication signatures in high school and junior high school yearbooks from the 1960s and early 1970s proved particularly revealing of the swell-to-cool transition that occurred at that time. I also consulted the Oxford English Dictionary (OED2 1989) and other references with historical data. Finally I collected data on the Chinese slang term ku (derived from English cool) during my fieldwork in Qingdao in 1993 and 1994 and in Beijing in 1998 and 2000.

Having collected a substantial body of data consisting of incidents of swell and cool in fictional dialogue, advertising copy, and natural discourse (written or oral), I then reviewed this material specifically looking for the

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referents that swell and cool most commonly designated. Finally, in order to identify their core meanings, I analyzed the uses to which these key terms were put and the contexts in which they were most commonly used.

SLANG DEFINITIONS

Recent linguistic work has refined our understanding of the notoriously slippery concept of slang. Finegan (1994, 373), for example, defines slang as a variety of speech “used in situations of extreme informality, often with rebellious undertones or an intention of distancing its users from certain mainstream values.” And according to Eble (1996, 116) three of the most typical functions of slang are to express informality, identify group mem- bership, and oppose established authority. Drake (1980) also sees slang as both creating distance (i.e., from social norms) and promoting solidarity for members of a group.

Chapman (1986), emphasizing what he calls the individual psychology of slang, characterizes the attitudes of members of subcultures in which slang particularly flourishes. The use of slang within such groups “is simul- taneously an act of featuring and obtruding the self within the subcul- ture—by cleverness, by control, by up-to-dateness, by insolence, by virtuosi- ties of audacious and usually satirical wit, by aggression” (xii–xiii). However, focus on the subcultures of slang fails to explain why slang is widely used in mainstream society. In fact basic slang is probably used as much within mainstream society as among subcultures, but its usage still conveys a somewhat subversive message.

In Dumas and Lighter (1978), the definition of slang receives a particu- larly systematic treatment. Slang here is defined as any expression that meets at least two of the following criteria (paraphrased):

1. It lowers the dignity of formal or serious speech or writing. 2. Its use implies the user’s familiarity either with the referent or with the less

statusful or less responsible class of people who have such special familiarity and use the term.

3. It is a tabooed term in ordinary discourse with persons of higher social status or greater responsibility.

4. It is used in place of the well-known conventional synonym, especially in order to (a) protect the user from the discomfort caused by the conven- tional item or (b) protect the user from the discomfort or annoyance of further elaboration.

The first of these criteria is identified as being central, if not crucial, to slang. Subsequent work by Lighter develops the idea of slang as standing in

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opposition to dignity. In the introduction to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Lighter (1994, xii) writes:

The use of slang undermines the dignity of verbal exchange and charges discourse with an unrefined and often aggressive informality. It pops the balloon of pretense. There is often a raw vitality in slang, a ribald sense of humor and a flip self- confidence; there is also very often locker-room crudity and toughness, a tawdry sensibility.

In his essay on slang in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Lighter (2001, 220) writes:

Slang denotes an informal, nonstandard, nontechnical vocabulary composed chiefly of novel-sounding synonyms (and near synonyms) for standard words and phrases; it is often associated with youthful, raffish, or undignified persons and groups; and it conveys often striking connotations of impertinence or irreverence, especially for established attitudes and values within the prevailing culture.

These definitions all have one trait in common: they define slang in terms of an extensive list of traits. Though the work of Lighter and others has significantly clarified our understanding of slang in context and with reference to historical trends, further advances can be made if we move beyond definitions that depend on trait lists and beyond lexicons that simply list slang terms. English slang expressions are, obviously, part of the English language, and as such they can be organized according to discern- ible underlying semantic features and functions much as other English lexemes can. Studies over the past few decades have revealed underlying semantic structures in the vocabulary of topics such as color terminology (Berlin and Kay 1969), furniture (Rosch 1978), birds (Boster 1988), and drinking vessels (Kronenfeld 1996). A typical feature of these semantic fields is the varying salience and functional significance of the terms that comprise them. Some terms leap to mind more readily than others (the word chair, for example, is more quickly conjured up when furniture is mentioned than is grandfather clock), and semantic fields are logically orga- nized by such features. The existence of basic slang suggests that slang lexicons can be similarly organized, and the resulting structures should help unveil some of the varying functions that slang serves.

The affective impact of slang is one of its defining factors. But affect itself comes in different forms, as “aggressive informality,” “raw vitality,” “ribald sense of humor,” “flip self-confidence,” “locker-room crudity and toughness,” and “tawdry sensibility” in Lighter’s (1994) description of slang make clear. What basic slang does is serve a particular affective function, and, in doing so, it manages to remain fresh despite its pervasive

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use in countless contexts over a period of many years. No other kinds of affectively charged slang terms can make this claim.

BASIC SLANG: THE PROCESS

There is a general evolutionary sequence according to which basic slang terms emerge in mainstream usage. The process begins with a term becom- ing widely used to refer to a set of values that have special appeal for a generation of adolescents and young adults. These values will include a somewhat deviant or rebellious dimension that Dumas and Lighter (1978) associate with those relatively low in status or responsibility. The set of values serves as the core referent of the slang term, and the enduring quality of these values underlies the longevity of the basic slang term for a given generation. As this cohort matures the basic term continues to be a prominent part of its vocabulary and is likewise taken up by those cohorts that follow immediately in its tracks. The new term will endure as a basic slang expression until another dramatic shift in generational values calls forth a new term with which the new rebellious younger generation identifies itself and distinguishes itself from its elders. Though common wisdom says that every new generation rejects its parents’ values, in fact important generational rebellions have occurred only twice in the twentieth century. The first, coming after World War I, was represented by a rejection of various long-standing Victorian values (Allen 1952; Coben 1991); the second youth rebellion reached its peak during the Vietnam War and had similarly dramatic long-term effects on American culture.

SWELL

Swell has had a career as a slang term lasting more than two centuries. In the late 1700s it was used as a noun referring to stylish young men. Ellen Moers (1960, 236) describes the “Heavy Swell” of London’s 1860s as the “descendant of the Gent (via the Man About Town and the Swell).”

The swell, whether heavy or ordinary, was defined mainly by his dress, his manners, and the people with whom he socialized. Swell continued to refer to prominent young men well into the twentieth century, particularly in Britain and somewhat less commonly in the United States. Its meaning eventually expanded to include any young male not in the working class.

Swell was used as an adjective as early as 1812, according to the OED2, to describe not only stylish young swells but things associated with them and with their elegant ways. In that year James Hardy Vaux defined the word

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swell in his lexicon of the flash language, or underworld slang, as follows: “Any thing remarkable for its beauty or elegance, is called a swell article; so, a swell crib, is a genteel home.” And Byron wrote in Don Juan in 1823 of a man “So prime, so swell [note gentlemanly] so nutty and so knowing” (canto 11, xix; brackets in the OED2 citation).

In Roughing It, Mark Twain (1871) has two gold prospectors dreaming of the trip they will take when they strike it rich, a trip that will last three years and will take them “everywhere.” The conversation concludes thus:

“Won’t it be a swell trip!” “We’ll spend forty or fifty thousand dollars trying to make it one, anyway.” [provided by Jonathan E. Lighter]

Beginning in the 1890s swell shifted its meaning in American English to refer to things without genteel or elegant qualities. Stephen Crane’s The Third Violet (1897, 44), for example, includes the sentence, “You don’t look as though you had such a swell time” (cited in OED2).

Also, George Ade’s various characters use the term swell in this general- ized sense, as in the following (provided by Jonathan E. Lighter):

“Don’t it kill you dead to see a swell girl—you know, a real peach—holden’ on to some freak with side whiskers.” [1896, 5]

“How are you feeling this morning?” “Swell and sassy.” [1903, 72]

Yet at around the turn of the century swell was still most commonly used to designate fancy, upper-class establishments, as in these examples from Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900):

It was a truly swell saloon, with rich screens, fancy wines, and a line of bar goods unsurpassed in the country. [33]

The finest resort in town. It’s a way-up, swell place. [71]

It seems that, as will be shown in the case of cool from the 1930s to the mid-1960s, swell for decades was not widely used as a term of approval in mainstream society, but was more or less marginalized. From the contexts in which it occurs as a counterword, or at least a generally applicable term, from the 1890s on to World War I, its seems to have been either confined mainly to characters who lived on the edge of respectable society, or employed by writers who wanted to highlight their characters’ lack of gentility. Ade was unusual in the extent to which he gloried in the use of slang, and in The Third Violet Crane used unrefined speech to emphasize the humble backgrounds of his characters.

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The most dramatic shift in the usage of swell occurred around the time of World War I when it began to be widely used as a generalized term of approval by the members of the younger generation, even among the middle and upper classes. At this time it most often referred to activities that defied the Victorian conventions of the older generation. The middle- class American Victorian cultural system of that era prominently included the values of earnestness, propriety, and prudishness. In matters of sexual- ity, particularly for women, the expectation was that young people would behave with restraint. Discreet sexual play was acceptable only between those who were planning or at least seriously considering marriage and was justified only in the context of a passionate love that had spiritual reso- nance (Lystra 1989).

But around the time of World War I a new attitude linked to a more liberal model of propriety was gaining ground among the younger genera- tion. The overt justification for this model was its modernity, but it may have enjoyed widespread acceptance among the middle class at least partly because people of this class felt secure in their status on the basis of racial and ethnic distinctions. Previous generations in both the British and the American middle classes had insisted on sexual restraint as a key indicator of female respectability. But by World War I the American middle class, unlike that in Britain, was distinguishable from the working class in that the latter consisted overwhelmingly of people who were not white, Anglo- Saxon, and Protestant. The guarantee of middle-class status for many young Americans, based on what were perceived as immutable ethnic distinctions vis-à-vis the Italians, Irish, blacks, and others in the working class, made sexual restraint less important as a class identifier than it had been in the past. This racially and ethnically based security among young middle-class Americans, along with the prosperity of the 1920s, very likely contributed to the rebellious rejection of Victorian standards concerning sexual restraint. Young middle-class Americans of the 1920s accepted light sexual play for both men and women and considered the casual, somewhat dispassionate, attitude toward sexuality that lay behind it more modern and generally superior to the Victorian style. The “petting party” was one newly overt and central feature of the 1920s youth culture that highlighted this attitude (Coben 1991; Stearns 1994).

The slang term swell, whose emerging preeminence paralleled the rise of this modern and somewhat hedonistic 1920s youth culture, took root and eventually became the single most widely used slang term of approval through the 1920s, and the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

By habitually using this term, young people signaled their willingness to rebel or deviate a bit from convention and to explicitly distance them- selves from the old Victorian model of earnestness, propriety, and righ-

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teous passion. This rebellion lies at the heart of what historian Peter Stearns (1994, 172) calls “the new culture” that began to emerge in the 1920s, a culture he describes as self-consciously modern in its opposition to Victorian values. The break between the values of the basically Victorian older generation and the rebellious “flaming youth” (as they were then commonly labeled) was an important source of generational identification. Whoever used the slang term swell was saying, in effect, “I want the world to know that I am the kind of young man or woman who goes to jazz clubs and indulges in petting parties.”

Swell in the 1920s was used most often in connection with fun-filled or sexually charged situations such as parties. In a 1917 letter, Ernest Hemingway writes from Europe to his family back home in Missouri:

We have been having a swell lot of fun down here with a new fellow named Johnson who is about Baby Dales [sic] speed and we have sure pulled some rare ones on him. [1981, 3]

By the mid-1920s the term appears frequently in correspondence. John Dos Passos writes in a 1928 letter from the Soviet Union to E. E. Cummings:

. . . things in these parts are pretty darn swell. . . . [1973, 386]

In a 1929 letter to an aunt, Dawn Powell writes:

I wrote you telling you how much I liked those swell little pants, but I never sent it. [1999, 70]

Also, in a passage in his epic novel U.S.A., Dos Passos (in one of numerous uses of this lexeme) has a young working-class character think to himself that he:

. . . wished he had a swell looking suit and a swell looking girl to walk with. [1929, 20]

Another example comes from the 1928 movie The Crowd, where the term is used in a lyric sung by a young newlywed:

Wife and I are happy And everything is swell It’s heavenly inside our flat But outside it is El

The 1930 film Children of Pleasure features a conversation between two men where one, with reference to a woman, says to his companion, “I got a swell number for you.” In fact by the 1930s, the term swell is so widely used in Hollywood movie dialogue that it is more difficult to find movies where it is

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absent than those in which it occurs. It is by then clearly the most perva- sively used slang term of approval in American English and no longer just among the younger generation. The young post–World War I generation of the 1920s that picked up this term as a symbol of its modern attitude continued to use swell even as it left its years of flaming youth behind. Also paralleling the rise of swell and its establishment as the thematic slang term of this generation was the rise of dating as a form of recreation among the middle class. This modern institution, along with the necking or sexual play it typically entails, has endured as a part of middle-class American youth culture since around 1920 (Bailey 1988).

In Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in Chicago Streets (1932), the first book in James T. Farrell’s 1930s trilogy on the life of his fictional Chicago working- class youth Studs Lonigan, swell is used repeatedly to describe a variety of people, things, and events encountered by the protagonist. No other slang term of approval is used with nearly the frequency of swell, though a few comparable words like jake appear once or twice. A close review of the uses of swell in this popular novel reveals its connection to situations whose most characteristic quality is ‘fun’ and which often entail youthful heterosexual interactions. Almost all of the 28 occurrences of the term swell in this narrative are voiced either by Studs himself or by one of the other adoles- cents in his gang.

Farrell’s most common usage of swell (8 of the 28) occurs in contexts or situations linked to the pleasure of female company. As Studs develops a crush on his friend Lucy he finds himself speculating that he would enjoy

. . . calling for Lucy and taking her out stepping to White City, having a swell time. [56]

It was all-swell to kiss Lucy, and it was different from a game where she had to kiss him, and everybody was kissing everybody else. [93]

A friend of Studs’s speculates about how “swell” it would be if women all wore revealing bathing suits (116), and another friend, to his irritation, describes Studs’s girlfriend as a “swell order of pork chops” (150).

The second most typical kind of reference for swell in the Farrell novel is to fun or otherwise enjoyable situations (5 of the 28). For example, spending a day at the beach on the shore of Lake Michigan and sitting around and talking with his friends are both described as swell. Also described as swell are situations in which some kind of advantage is gained in social relations, as when Studs imagines how swell it would be to criticize a snooty girl if her virtue were known to be compromised, or when he contemplates how swell it is to be regarded as a tough guy, having beaten up his primary gang rival. Candy and tobacco are also described as swell, as are

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a skilled singer and the father of one of Studs’s friends who is admired because he seems to understand and sympathize with the boys. The most abstract application appears when one of Studs’s friends speculates that it would be swell “if we didn’t have to die” (121).

Swell then is linked to the new anti-Victorian values in that it is most commonly applied to young, likable, and fun-loving people and to the situations, particularly parties, where such people are likely to be encoun- tered. The timing of its appearance and its rapid expansion during the 1920s in tandem with the rapid expansion of the casual, fun-focused youth culture and the dating-for-pleasure complex that the middle class popular- ized at this time point to a semantic link between the term and the new anti- Victorian attitude.

Of course since swell ’s popularity entailed its conversion into a counterword, beginning in the 1920s almost anything positive could be called swell. In the films of this era and the writings of such popular authors as John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell, swell easily outdistances all other positive slang expressions in its breadth of application, serving, in fact, as the slang equivalent of the word good. But it differs from good in an important way: it is used to refer to people and things that are directly pleasing but is not used in reference to abstract moralistic qualities or things that are good in the sense of being approved by established authority figures. That is, young Studs Lonigan would not be likely to say something like this: “It was swell the way Father Donahue made me say six Hail Marys this morning. It shows he really cares about me.” This kind of usage would align the term with the authorities and the formal moral order that swell, as a slang term, implicitly opposes. That is, in accordance with Lighter’s (2001, 220) portrayal of slang, swell in its heyday conveyed “striking conno- tations of impertinence or irreverence, especially for established attitudes and values within the prevailing culture.”

According to Malcolm Cowley (1934, 65), the values and institutions of the new youth culture of the 1920s (that he links to Greenwich Village’s influence) was in decline as a form of bohemian rebelliousness in the 1930s because the entire country had begun to accept its style:

It was dying because women smoked cigarettes on the streets of the Bronx, drank gin cocktails in Omaha and had perfectly swell parties in Seattle and Middletown.

But though the 1920s youth culture style may have seemed less bohe- mian by the 1930s, the somewhat rebellious connotations of it and its leading slang term endured at least into the 1950s. The deviant/rebellious feature of swell can be seen in some examples drawn from fictional dia- logue. In the following excerpt from Young Lonigan, Studs’s working-class

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father is conversing with the pompous Mr. Gorman who wants to brag about his daughter but does not appreciate her being described as “swell.”

“Oh! It was excellent. Excellent. Did you hear my daughter rendering a selection from Mozart and a nocturne from Sho-pan?”

“She was swell. I liked her,” said Lonigan. “Well, I wouldn’t say that she was precisely swell; but I do believe, I do

believe that she interpreted the masters with grace, charm, talent, verve and fire,” said Mr. Dennis P. Gorman. [43]

In Meredith Willson’s 1957 play The Music Man (known today mainly in the 1962 film version), Professor Harold Hill warns parents about the wayward tendencies of their children:

“Mothers of River City. Heed that warning before it’s too late. Watch for the telltale signs of corruption. The minute your son leaves the house, does he rebuckle his knickerbockers below the knees? Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corn crib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy’s Whizbang? Are certain words creeping into his conversation, words like ‘swell’ and ‘So’s your old man?’”

As late as the 1950s swell continued to be regarded with suspicion by arbiters of propriety. In the I Love Lucy episode “Lucy Hires an English Tutor” (1952), Lucy and her friend Ethel are being coached by Percy Livermore, a specialist in diction, who warns the ladies that there are two words they should always avoid, “One of those is swell and the other one is lousy.” To which Lucy replies, “OK, what are they?”

To sum up, the emergence of a new basic slang term can be summa- rized as follows: a set of particularly appealing core attributes (the core referent) comes to be associated with a slang term. Being slang, the term necessarily suggests a degree of deviance or rebelliousness vis-à-vis estab- lished convention and implies a measure of individual empowerment for those who use it, those who, as Dumas and Lighter indicated, are likely to be of relatively low status. The values comprising the term’s core referent, being themselves approved of by the slang term users, render the term useful as a universal expression of approval, or a counterword. Such a term, when used, both expresses approval of its immediate referent and signals a degree of commitment to deviant, rebellious, or antiauthoritarian values. As will be discussed below, the antiauthoritarian nature of swell is not easily recognized by those who grew up after the World War II era because the emergence of cool eventually converted swell into a term implying main- stream benignity.

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COOL : AFRICAN AMERICAN ORIGINS

A number of attempts to analyze cool have been undertaken in recent years by various scholars, journalists and writers (Majors and Billson 1992; Danesi 1994; Stearns 1994; Connor 1995; Frank 1997; Pountain and Robins 2000; MacAdams 2001). Invariably these efforts have noted the difficulty of pinning this concept down and clarifying its essential meaning. A first step in reaching such a clarification, a step taken by none of these authors, is to note that cool is a counterword, and that therefore anything can be described as cool. This means that the core referent of cool needs to be distinguished from all of its other, derivative applications. To identify the core meanings of this term, I cite its most common referents, especially those referents alluded to by key participants in the jazz and beat cultures where the modern concept originated and in some of its subsequent transformations among mainstream youth in the 1960s.

Cool as a metaphor for emotional control and subdued emotionalism has deep roots and can even be seen as a kind of natural metaphor. Certain emotions, particularly anger, passion, and excitement, are represented in various cultures and historical eras as metaphorically hot. Conversely the use of cool to refer to a subdued or controlled emotional state is both long- lived and widespread. Rebhun (1999) refers to the hot-cold dichotomy as a metaphor for passionate versus dispassionate people in the Pernambuco region of Brazil. In Mandarin Chinese the word leng, which literally means ‘cold’, metaphorically describes feelings and behaviors that lack affection or cordiality. In the nineteenth-century novel Little Women (Alcott 1868, 168), the word cool in reference to emotional control sometimes has a negative connotation:

“Well, that’s cool,” said Laurie to himself, “to have a picnic and never ask me. . . .”

The OED2 lists a number of usages, some of them quite ancient, in which cool refers to dispassionate, relaxed, and calmly audacious people. But it is only in the 1930s in African American usage that the term cool takes on its unambiguously positive tone. Lighter’s (1994–) Historical Dictionary cites such early usages as the following from Zora Neale Hurston’s collection Mules and Men (1935, 33): “Many, you know Ah don’t go nowhere unless Ah take my box [guitar] wid me. . . . And what make it so cool, Ah don’t go nowhere unless I play it” (brackets and ellipsis in the Dictionary citation).

The slang term cool that emerged in the 1930s elaborated on the basic metaphor of subdued emotion adding in particular the qualities of knowingness, detachment, and control. Knowingness, as a core quality of modern cool, refers to something more specific than mere “knowledge.”

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Knowingness implies a kind of insider knowledge, access to information that the speaker is in some sense privileged to have. It is the qualities of knowingness, detachment, and control along with the implication of rebel- liousness that make up the original core referent of the modern cool concept and that distinguish modern cool from its less specific predeces- sors.

In his 1963 study of African American music, Leroi Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka) explained cool as follows:

The term cool in its original context meant a specific reaction to the world, a specific relationship to one’s environment. It defined an attitude that actually existed. To be cool was, in its most accessible meaning, to be calm, even unim- pressed, by what horror the world might daily propose. As a term used by Negroes, the horror, etc., might be simply the deadeningly predictable mind of white America. [213]

Jones defines being cool as being “calm, unimpressed [and] detached.” A variety of jazz originally associated with Miles Davis and his ensemble came to be referred to as cool, and the Miles Davis recordings of 1949 and 1950 are often referred to in jazz history as “The Birth of the Cool.” The subdued and cerebral style of Davis’s group parallels the features of knowingness and detachment that are more generally associated with being cool in African American culture.

A number of authors besides Leroi Jones have noted the important function of the “cool pose” in African American culture as a defense mechanism against white racism (Majors and Billson 1992; Connor 1995; MacAdams 2001). This pose—that of the knowing, self-sufficient, and detached individual—is the original core referent of cool, and it served the mainly white Beat generation writers in much the same way as it had served their African American predecessors.

BEAT COOL

Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes helped popularize the term cool throughout the 1950s. These authors and their circle, de- scribed by Norman Mailer (1959) as “white negroes,” included figures like Gary Goodrow, whom MacAdams (2001, 20) describes as a 1950s hipster active in New York’s Living Theater. According to Goodrow, “to be cool was to be in charge, unfazed by the bullshit of life. . . . The outward signs of cool had everything to do with an appearance of easy competence. . . . To be cool was to be not frantic, not overblown.” Furthermore, according to Goodrow, many of the “life-affirming” features of black American culture

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lay at the heart of cool: “like jazz, like relaxation, like general enjoyment of life outside the commercial pressure cooker. Any white who felt a healthy disgust for the ridiculous society around him gravitated in that direction.”

One of the most detailed descriptions of the concept of cool by a non– African American writer is that of John Clellon Holmes in his 1952 novel Go about the beat culture of New York. In the following passage the protago- nist, Hobbes, and his girlfriend are seated in a jazz club near a table where a newly arrived threesome sits. Hobbes had been trying to explain “what was suggested by the term ‘cool’ as hipsters used it.”

“When the music is cool, it’s pleasant, somewhat meditative and without tension. Everything before, you see, just last year, was ‘crazy,’ ‘frantic,’ ‘gone.’ Now, everybody is acting cool, unemotional, withdrawn. . . . But, look there, the guy coming to that table is ‘cool’!”

And it was true. The man he indicated so perfectly epitomized everything that might conceivably be meant by the term that for ten minutes Hobbes could not take his eyes off him.

Wraithlike, this person glided among the tables wearily, followed by a six-foot, supple redhead in a green print dress, and a sallow, wrinkled little hustler. . . . The “cool” man wore a wide flat brimmed slouch hat that he would not remove, and a tan drape suit that seemed to wilt at his thighs. The stringy hair on his neck protruded over a soft collar, and his dark, oily face was an expressionless mask. He moved with a huge exhaustion, as though sleep walking, and his lethargy was so consummate that it seemed to accelerate the universe around him. He sprawled at the table between the redhead and the other fellow, his head sunk into his palms, the brim of his zoot hat lowered just far enough so that no light from the bandstand could reach him. He became particularly immobile during the hottest music, as though it was a personal challenge to his somnambulism on the part of the musicians. . . .

. . . One imagined that if a waiter had come up and requested him to remove the hat, he might have slowly, with weary irritation, reached to the holster under his arm and fingered a chilly automatic. Some night, in this very spot, when he had sunken to the abysses of his droopy lassitude, he might have pulled out his rod and sullenly shot up the place out of sheer ennui. [209–10]

Several features of the cool character in Holmes’s sketch illustrate impor- tant aspects of this concept. First, the stylish hipster zoot suit highlights the role of fashion as an arena for the expression of cool. In the world of the urban hipsters and, later on, in the world of middle-class youth, command of fashionable clothing and grooming styles were important in establishing status. Stylishness can be linked to cool not only because stylishness is good (therefore cool in a broad sense) but also because stylishness is based on a kind of knowingness and knowingness is a core feature of cool.

Basic Slang and Generational Shifts in Values 73

In addition to the emotionally subdued quality of Holmes’s cool hipster are indications of his detachment from the world around him. His lethargic pace stands in contrast to the movement and the music that surrounds him, his face is “an expressionless mask,” and his eyes are invisible beneath the brim of his hat. More commonly the detachment of the cool one from the world is symbolically represented by sunglasses that hide the eyes. Holmes’s cool character is, of course, a male, and, though he does not state this overtly, cool in the 1940s and 50s was more prominently associated with males than with females. It might be said that a male African American jazz musician wearing sunglasses on an expressionless face is the prototypical image of the cool person.

Finally the imaginary burst of violence that Holmes describes in which the zoot suiter shoots up the jazz joint out of ennui draws attention to the element of self-sufficiency or control that is an enduring key feature of the cool individual. The picture drawn through this imagery is that of a person who barely moves, yet who is capable of dominating any situation that might arise. Thus emotional control expands conceptually to the point where it includes control in general. This image of the individual who says little, moves little, and expresses little, yet remains knowing and in control is central to the modern sense of cool.

Jack Kerouac’s (1957) novel On the Road, which the author began writing in 1951 (at about the same time as Holmes’s Go was published) offers some hints as to how the term cool was being used by the Beats as a generalized term of approval. In this novel Kerouac’s first uses of cool refer to the world of jazz:

The leader was a slender, drooping, curly-haired, pursy-mouthed tenorman, thin of shoulder, draped loose in a sports shirt, cool in the warm night, self-indulgence written in his eyes, who picked up his horn and frowned in it and blew cool and complex and was dainty stamping his foot to catch ideas, and ducked to miss others—and said, “Blow,” very quietly when the other boys took solos. [238]

Later in the novel, Sal Paradise (representing the author) and his buddy Dean Moriarty are driving through northern Mexico, and here they find people and experiences also worthy of the adjective cool, but with no relationship to the world of jazz. At one point Moriarty describes the older Mexican men as “so cool and grand and not bothered by anything” (278).

The works of white Beat authors like Holmes and Kerouac illustrate the emergence of the cool concept from the world of African American jazz and its representation in widely read works of fiction. The Beat movement, with its antiracist, anticapitalist, and antihypocrisy themes, was a transmission

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device that helped bring the slang term cool and its core meaning from the world of jazz to mainstream culture.

COOL : FROM BEAT CULTURE TO MAINSTREAM

Some traces of the gradual appearance of cool in the mainstream world can be found in movies of the 1950s and 1960s. The 1957 Elvis Presley vehicle Jailhouse Rock shows us the swell-to-cool shift in midstream, as the Presley character (Vince) alternates between the use of these two terms. The following exchange occurs at a restaurant where Vince is sitting with his girlfriend/agent, Peg:

peg: You might at least ask me what happened this afternoon. vince: What happened this afternoon? peg: I sold your record, that’s all. vince (sarcastically): Swell. I can tear into a good steak.

In another scene Vince refers to his new friend Laurie as “a real cool little singer.” And he receives a fan letter that reads in part, “I saw you on television today singing from a jail and I thought you looked real cool.”

The Las Vegas–based rat pack similarly straddles the swell/cool divide in American popular culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and their pals are sometimes seen as the epitome of early mainstream cool in that they portray characters who are competent, in the know, and unconventional by virtue of being free of the strictures of domestic, middle-class milieus. Perhaps because they were middle-aged by then, cool is not prominent in their vocabulary, except in the case of Sammy Davis, Jr., the only African American in the group.

An important trend linked to the evolution of cool in the 1950s was the tendency for adolescents to see their elders as lacking in authenticity and sincerity. The popularity of J. D. Salinger’s (1951) The Catcher in the Rye and the James Dean film Rebel without a Cause (1955) is largely a function of their sympathetic depictions of adolescents who feel alienated from adults. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in Catcher, condemns many of the adults in his world as phony, and Natalie Wood’s character in Rebel repeatedly praises those whom she believes to be sincere.

The Catcher in the Rye and Rebel without a Cause were the first popular vehicles to deal with post–World War II adolescent-adult conflict with sympathy for the adolescent point of view. Even though none of the characters in either of them used the term cool (and Caulfield repeatedly uses swell), these characters were early representations of types that would eventually be described by young Americans as cool. In fact, the 1970s rock

Basic Slang and Generational Shifts in Values 75

group The Eagles (1974) produced a song titled “James Dean,” which featured the refrain “You were just too cool for school,” and Dean’s portrait adorns the cover of Pountain and Robins’s Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (2000).

The widespread alienation from adults that characterized adolescents in the 1950s facilitated their eventual acceptance of the African American/ Beat term cool. By the 1960s cool for mainstream teen culture came to be linked to a posture of detachment from adult culture in general. In other words it served the antimainstream/antiauthoritarian role parallel to the role of swell in the 1920s. The values that American teenagers at this time were exposed to can be described as falling into two broad categories: those presented by the adult world that offered eventual economic security through hard, honest work and obedience to authority, and those con- trolled by the adolescents themselves in the milieu of the school that were linked to peer group prestige. This prestige or “popularity” was largely a function of sex appeal, a sense of style, and the capacity to present oneself as poised and in control. In some cases the “in control” factor could be enhanced by a demonstrated capacity to defy adult guidelines or authority.

Some examples of dialogue from movies of this era suggest the linkage of the word cool to these peer-controlled adolescent values. In the 1964 film The World of Henry Orient, the 14-year-old protagonists (both female) use the newly popular slang term on two occasions. Once, when they don Chinese style hats in homage to the object of their crush, one of the girls exclaims, “They’re cool.” And, at the end of the film, once they have abandoned their fantasy crushes and are on the verge of plunging into the world of real dating, one reacts to the other’s new use of make-up by saying, “Cool!”

In The Sandpiper (1965), the beatnik artist played by Elizabeth Taylor tells her nine-year-old son that she will visit his school on Charter Day. The son replies, “You will? Man that will be cool. I mean when you walk in and all the guys see how pretty you are.”

In all of these cases the slang lexeme cool is linked to adolescent status hierarchies and crushes rather than the more sober values of the adult world.

SWELL TO COOL SHIFT

Further evidence of the mainstream shift in slang usage in the 1960s comes from signatures in secondary school yearbooks, a total of 13 such books providing the data in table 1. Typical signatures included the following phrases:

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It certainly has been swell having you in my English class [1964] Best of luck to a swell copy editor [1965] We’ve got some cool times ahead! [1964] Best of wishes to a real cool guy. [1964] Always remember the cool times we had with Mr. Wukovitz. [1965] To a real neat and nice, cool, great, average good girl. [1969]

The 1967–71 yearbook signatures suggest that by the late 1960s swell was dead among American adolescents. The signatures in these later yearbooks did not include a single use of swell, but had 12 references to cool, 3 of them in the phrase keep (it) cool, 7 referring to a cool person/kid, and 2 referring to cool times, as in “This year has really been cool.” Despite the small size of this sample, it does demonstrate that by 1964 cool was a regular part of adolescent discourse and was being used in some contexts much as swell had been used earlier. Furthermore, the inverted pattern, swell declin- ing in use as cool expands, points to the common function these terms served and hints that only one was likely to survive in the role of a widely used, broadly positive counterword. There is, it might be said, room for only one basic slang term for any given generation.

Further evidence for the special prominence of cool in post-1967 youth cultures can be found in the work of Dumas and Lighter (1978), Labov (1992), and Eble (1996). Labov notes the breadth of cool’s popularity among various subgroups of youth and even uses cool as a defining term for

table 1 Occurrences of swell and cool in Student Signatures in Yearbooks for the Classes

of 1962–68 and 1971 from Public Secondary Schools in Lakeland, Florida; New Milford, New Jersey; Mariemount, Ohio; and Tucson, Arizona

Number of Number of cases occurrences of swell occurrences of cool

1960 8 0 1961 3 0 1962 6 0 1963 5 0 1964 1 2 1965 1 1 1966 2 0 1967 0 3 1968 0 3 1971 0 6

note: Thirteen yearbooks were reviewed, one for each of the years listed, except for 1960, 1967, and 1968, each of which was represented by two yearbooks.

Basic Slang and Generational Shifts in Values 77

other positive slang terms, while Eble’s work highlights cool’s longevity and its broad applicability.

It might be argued that the “cool” values that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s represented nothing more than a continuation of the “swell” values of previous generations. The concepts share an anti-Victorian atti- tude that holds sternness and prudery at bay while signaling a measure of rebelliousness in the highly informal quality of their representative terms. Given that a swell time in 1925 might amount to the same thing as a cool time in 1965, it could be argued that all cool ultimately did was to overthrow swell and take its place.

But a crucial difference in the core referents is that cool, unlike swell, implies a quality of knowingness that is not only leery of conventional prudery but regards it and other conventional values as phony and hypo- critical. The distrust toward conventional standards and authority figures implied by the term cool is much more pointed than anything suggested by its predecessor, swell. And linked to this central quality of knowingness for cool are the other original qualities of detachment, emotional calm, and control, qualities that were not evoked by swell. They were originally associ- ated with cool in African American culture and continued to be associated with it in mainstream youth culture.

SWELL BECOMES CORNY

As cool became the basic slang term of a generation that strove to distin- guish itself from its predecessors, swell came to be reinterpreted as extraor- dinarily uncool. Its bad boy image, referred to by Meredith Willson, James T. Farrell, and Lucy’s diction coach, was gone. Swell assumed a place in the youth culture’s semantic universe opposite to cool; suddenly swell meant ‘corny, square’.

The decidedly unhip quality acquired by swell is starkly dramatized in the 1985 brat pack movie The Breakfast Club. In one scene in this film the cool hoodlum character ridicules the nerdy good boy by depicting the latter’s home life as hopelessly naive, concluding with a mock dialogue between the nerd’s parents that ends thus:

“Dear, isn’t our son swell?” “Yes, Dear. Isn’t life swell?”

Cool not only took on the broadly positive role of a cohort counterword for the baby boomer generation, but then, Oedipus-like, proceeded to kill swell with contempt. As of the late 1960s swell had become the perfect

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lexeme for mocking the unhip. This is in spite of the fact that the affable sociability so characteristic of the swell young moderns of the 1920s, is also a prominent feature of contemporary cool college students.

Another passage that marks the generational shift indicated by the succession of these two terms is the following passage from Mary Rodgers’s 1972 adolescent novel, Freaky Friday:

My parents told him he was welcome to come back anytime, and he said how about tomorrow. We all said that would be swell. (Actually, my father said swell, mother said lovely, and I said cool. . . .). [144]

Swell has come to be regarded not only as an indicator of naïveté, but also of a corny sort of earnest enthusiasm, as in this quote from a Leonard Maltin minireview of the 1952 film The Greatest Show on Earth:

Big package of fun from DeMille complete with hokey performances, cliches, big-top excitement, and a swell train wreck. [Maltin 1998, 541]

Swell, in other words, by the late 1960s, had acquired connotations of being out of the loop, earnest, naive, and foolishly excitable. These features put it in direct opposition to the core meaning of cool with its implications of detachment, knowingness, and emotional control. Of course swell in its heyday did not have these uncool connotations. It acquired them by virtue of its status as the basic slang term of the parental generation, the genera- tion against which the adolescent cool concept was directed during the counterculture of the late 1960s. In a kind of structural transformation that brings to mind Lévi-Strauss’s (1962) notion of oppositional totemic emblems being “good to think,” swell became conceptually transformed into the virtual opposite of cool.

A NEW KIND OF KNOWINGNESS: HIP CONSUMERISM

The middle-class youth of the late 1950s had learned from their cool predecessors, the Beats, to admire the hip and detached attitude first developed as a defense mechanism by African Americans. But adolescent cool was mainly a proclamation of rebellion against the older generation rather than against racism or exploitative capitalism, as it had been for the jazzmen and the beats. Of course the antiestablishment cool of the 1950s generation and the antiparental cool of 1960s adolescents do overlap. After all, the racist and otherwise dehumanizing institutions that the original cool rebels reacted against were controlled by adult authority figures, the same figures from whom adolescents sought to distance themselves.

Basic Slang and Generational Shifts in Values 79

The growth of the counterculture among university students and other urban youth in the 1960s brought about a blending of two streams of cool consciousness. On one hand there was the sense of alienation from the parents’ generation as represented by James Dean and Holden Caulfield. Along with this came a growing awareness of the fissures in American society, specifically the conflicts between American ideals and the realities of racism, materialism, and political corruption. No doubt the suspicions already felt toward adult authorities by teenagers made it easy for many to slip into political opposition against the same capitalistic and militaristic institutions that their Beat predecessors in the 1950s had denigrated.

But the concept of cool among 1960s youth exhibited some interesting convolutions. Thomas Frank (1997), in The Conquest of Cool: Business Cul- ture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, describes the process whereby clever advertising agencies portrayed their clients as cool by slyly mocking the phoniness and pretentiousness of traditional ads. These hip ad designs struck a chord in the youth of the 1960s. But ironically the young Americans who bought into Volkswagen’s hip and knowing ads, though feeling cool and detached as they did so, were being seduced by the cleverness of the capitalist establishment. The fact that a Madison Avenue ad agency could successfully strike a cool pose is one indication that the concept of cool among mainstream youth had changed from its original jazz world significance. One result of this transformation was the correlation of cool with success, a correlation that was not characteristic of the cool origi- nally described by Leroi Jones.

RECENT TRENDS: COOL WINNERS

The two-tiered structure of the term cool, with its core referent and its secondary applicability to virtually anything, is revealed in the tendency for cool to be more commonly applied to some kinds of people and things than to others. The referents that are more likely to be so labeled are semanti- cally linked to the aforementioned core features of emotional control, detachment, knowingness, and deviance from the mainstream.

Pountain and Robins, for example, describe cool as “an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals to express defiance to authority . . . [which] conceals its rebellion behind a mask of ironic impassivity” (2000, 19).

A particular kind of knowingness that is often described as cool is that which is up to date not in fashion but in technology. In fact the expression cool is widely used in contexts related to software use and development. Fred Moody (1995, xl), in his account of his “year with Microsoft on the

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multimedia frontier,” writes that cool at that corporation’s headquarters could have any of the following meanings:

perfect, phenomenal, awesome, ingenious, eye-popping, bliss inducing, pretty, clever, enchanting, fine, adequate, acceptable, okay, or any of hundreds of other such words.

Of course Moody’s description simply emphasizes that cool is a widely used counterword. However, the fact that he chose to focus on this particular term in his discussion of language use at Microsoft highlights the centrality of this term in high tech contexts.

Knowingness as a feature of cool is also emphasized in contexts that refer neither to technology or style. The following dialogue is from the 1996 Doug Liman movie Swingers:

“For some reason the cool bars in Hollywood have to be hard to find and have no sign. . . . It’s a speakeasy kind of thing. It’s kind of cool. It’s like you’re in on a secret.”

Another unsurprising feature of the cool concept is its continuing association with rebelliousness or deviance. This feature of cool is empha- sized in the following comments from teenagers interviewed in the PBS Frontline documentary The Lost Children of Rockdale County (1999):

In reference to group sex: “She thought it was the coolest thing.” In reference to drinking alcohol: “When you’re that young you do it to be cool.”

The following comment by a 10-year-old was noted in a conversation in 1998:

She thinks she’s so cool because she’s in the advanced math section. That’s not what most kids think is cool. Cool has to do with being popular and that kind of thing.

In the Seinfeld episode “The Little Jerry” (1997), George Costanza humor- ously validates the cool quality of the social outsider or deviant when, in a conversation with an attractive prison librarian, he blurts out, “You’re in prison? That is so cool!”

Dalzell (1996, 126–27) tracks the history of the slang term cool focus- ing mainly on its emergence with bop musicians in the 1940s. Like most of those who attempt to explain this modern slang term, he finds it unusually “amorphous and ubiquitous.” The attributes that he emphasizes parallel those discussed above, as when he writes it came to be applied to “detached,

Basic Slang and Generational Shifts in Values 81

cerebral, stylish hipsters, jazzmen and rebels,” but then notes that it “quickly began its surge towards a mainstream term of approval.”

Within the mainstream teenage world of the 1950s and 1960s, adult authorities in general were regarded with suspicion, and so cool came to refer to people and things distinctly separate from adult-approved conven- tions, particularly things and people that were prominent in adolescent prestige hierarchies. In effect, one of the most common synonyms for the popular crowd among adolescents was “the cool kids.” At the same time the adult world came to be viewed as both foolishly rigid (square, as the dominant anticool phrase of the 1950s had it), and hypocritical. One of the key transformations of the cool concept as it entered mainstream use was its gradual acceptance as referring to winners. In the jazz and Beat worlds the cool person was necessarily marginalized vis-à-vis the power structure. The very word Beat has semantic links to the notion of one who has been beaten down by the dominant society.

But for 1960s mainstream adolescents a person could win in the power struggle and still be cool, particularly if he or she managed to project an image that suggested authenticity, a laid-back quality, and a willingness to defy convention. So Bob Dylan and the Beatles, extraordinarily successful in the dominant capitalist arena, could still be viewed as cool because their work expressed a defiant anticonventional quality. The same could be said of Sean Connery, Paul Newman, and other performers who portrayed assertively individualistic and rebellious characters. As the defiantly indi- vidualistic cool figures of 1960s popular culture rose to prominence, previously popular figures who emphasized earnest propriety quickly faded, Pat Boone being perhaps the best-known example of this type.

This cool concept with its distrust of authority and admiration for the rebellious and unconventional lay at the heart of the 1960s counterculture. Why this confluence of attitudes brought about such dramatic turmoil in the late 1960s and not at some earlier or later date is a topic that has been discussed at length elsewhere. Obviously significant were the self-confidence enjoyed by a prosperous and increasingly well-educated youth cohort as well as the gross injustices and other horrors that television coverage made visible to this cohort in such areas as race relations and the Vietnam War. Of particular concern to the explanation offered here concerning psychologi- cal links to linguistic expression is that the emerging counterculture em- ployed a model that had been originally forged in a marginalized African American context, and, after modifying that model slightly, made it a central value complex for an entire generation. As that generation has grown up, it has held onto the basic slang term, borrowed from African

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American and Beat culture, by which it first identified itself as distinct from its predecessors.

The blend of the jazz/Beat version of cool with mainstream adolescent attitudes has resulted in a bifocal cultural model of cool. Both foci share the key features of knowingness, control, and deviance from authority figures, yet they are distinguished from each other in that one (closer to the original cool) includes the feature of subdued emotionalism with implica- tions of detachment, while the other emphasizes popularity and affability. The one link that this second focus has to the subdued emotionalism of the detached jazz and Beat worlds is the laid back factor.

INTERNATIONAL COOL

American style cool is now making itself felt in various international youth culture contexts. In 1999 I heard an 11-year-old monolingual French- speaking Swiss girl, while visiting her grandfather’s farm, respond “Cool!” when told she could help round up the calves to be trucked to the mountains. In fact this word is now widely used in various European countries.

And starting in the 1990s young urban Chinese in the People’s Repub- lic of China began using the word ku as a Mandarin rendering of the English slang term cool. Its meaning appears to be shifting as different aspects of international youth culture make themselves felt in East Asia, but one of its early connotations emphasized individualism. As a 26-year-old university graduate from Shandong province wrote in a 1999 e-mail mes- sage, “[Ku] is rather a kind of style—new, independent, unique—meaning it is different from the classical, and different from the ordinary yet in no way low tasted” (Moore 2000).

CONCLUSION: BASIC SLANG AND THE CASE FOR FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES IN SLANG LEXICONS

Basic slang typically arises within the context of a youth culture and in its earliest usage serves to highlight value differences between young and old. As the younger generation grows older, the term continues to be widely used as long as the values to which it is linked continue to be embraced by the rising cohort. This is the most plausible explanation for the endurance for decades of slang terms like swell and cool. It is not plausible, after all, that Americans suddenly began to use swell as their favorite slang term in 1917, and then just as suddenly dropped it in 1967 for no reason other than they

Basic Slang and Generational Shifts in Values 83

were finally tired of it. Rather these linguistic shifts are indicative of positively valued emotional attitudes that can rise or fall rather abruptly and do so in the hands of those youthful cohorts that decisively reject some of their parents’ values.

The only word that might be compared to swell and cool in terms of its pervasiveness and endurance is okay, and okay’s status as a slang term is problematic. As Lighter and others have emphasized, slang terms carry a note of rebelliousness, a feature that okay lacks. If, for example, in a highly formal setting, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, a justice were to respond to a colleague’s comments by saying That’s good or Okay, little would be made of it. But the response That’s cool would certainly suggest either irony or inadequate respect for the established order. Cool, in other words, is clearly a slang term, while okay might better be classed as a colloquial or informal expression.

On the other hand, slang words like hip that can be described as enduring lack the extremely broad applicability of cool and swell. Hip is limited in reference to a value, a kind of knowingness, that is a core feature of cool. However, unlike cool, hip is not routinely used as a broadly applicable term of approval. Hip, in other words, is slang but is not a generalized term of approval, while okay, though a broadly applicable term of approval, is not really slang.

The combined qualities of being pervasively used and used over a great length of time make basic slang distinctly different from other slang terms, some of which may be extensively used and then dropped, others of which may endure, but only by virtue of their being little used. The key to basic slang’s combination of pervasiveness and longevity is its link to the speaker’s identity. Speakers who utter the term cool suggest that they understand and approve of the attitude of knowingness, detachment, control, and rebel- liousness that comprises the core meaning of this term. Despite being widely used over a period of decades, the core value that cool expresses is still positively valued by the baby boom generation and the cohorts follow- ing it, and this core value gives this slang term its quality of undiminished freshness.

NOTES

I would like to thank Tom Dalzell, Connie Eble, Hill Gates, David Kronenfeld, Jonathan Lighter, and Leigh Ann Wheeler for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Professor Lighter was also kind enough to provide me with material from his notes for the forthcoming volume 3 of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994–).

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