What it is to be cool

[€uroMeinke]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

But the first has nothing to do with what individuals find "cool". In that case, the word "cool" has an entirely different meaning, they're simply homonyms. Whether you personally ascribe to it or not, the fact remains that there are certain things, transient as they may be, that at any given time are defined by society as "cool", individual tastes aside. These things don't define individuals, but they define trends and societies. It doesn't matter if I lived in LA through the 80s and didn't surf/thought it was boring. The fact remains that surfing was "cool".

Yes, but in those "what is cool" situations - there usually is a newer synonymy for cool used to describe it - so it's cooler than cool - Boss, Rad, Groovy, Bitchen, Phat, gnarly, etc. thus "cool" is sort a secondary generic.

But if we want to get pedantic, we can just argue that cool is about temperature.