Ali Binazir

For some reason this popped into my head while dining on pansit, a filipino dish. Perhaps it was something in a Time magazine article on John Kerry, which made me wonder. Now normally these thoughts go unacknowledged and experience their own exponential decay, with no herald of their birth nor record of their demise. But now I have a blog, which is precisely for this kind of fleeting thought-form to have its moment of exposure to retinas not my own. Of course, dear reader, now you get impatient — ‘Which thought, for godssakes?’ Ah yes. I was thinking what constitutes ‘cool’ and ‘coolness’. Such a bandied-about term, and one that at best has a Justice Felix Frankfurter definition to it (”I know it when I see it”). In fact there was a good part of one Simpsons episode devoted to deftly defining ‘cool’ (or at least demonstrating its undefinability). So, in the fine tradition of the reductionist, I will say that coolness is a mix of several components. Tolerance is one of them — to ‘be cool about something’ means that you do not bludgeon it with your judgment. A corollary to that is imperturbability — if you are cool, you tend not to get too riled up, emotional, defensive about things. But the mix of imperturbable and tolerant merely makes for mellow; there must be other factors involved. Edginess and an independent spirit certainly qualify, as does a tendency to care for others (although I would argue altruism is not a requirement of cool, but an adjunct). Talent is good. Egolessness is good, although there are some industrial-strength braggarts out there who love themselves so much, we sometimes find ourselves swept into their world and find them undeniably cool (e.g. Muhammad Ali). I think if I were to pick one characteristic to round out what makes cool, it would be competence. Without manifestation, talent means little and fails to communicate itself. So, until the next revision, here are the x-y-z axes of cool, the Holy Trinity of Tolerance, Imperturbability, and Competence.
Question for follow-up: Which other countries and linguistic traditions have an equivalent word for ‘cool’? How many of them have appropriated it from America? Is ‘cool’ an American concept at its heart?