a new Hippie Dictionary
Donna Richoux
edited by John Bassett McCleary (Ten-Speed Press). This article lists
some sample words:
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/9244573.htm
What I don't see yet is whether this is merely one guy's personal list
and definitions (which I suspect) or a serious attempt to gather dated
citations (which I doubt).
It would be cool if it shed some light on words like "cool".
--
Best -- Donna Richoux
Luca
>It would be cool if it shed some light on words like "cool".
Wasn't 'cool' used before? I thought it went back to the jazz scene
around 60-ish where people would occasionally refer to each other as
'cool cats'.
But then again, I wasn't really there...
Luca
--
"Life doesn't imitate art, life imitates bad TV."
Ben Zimmer
>
> There are news stories out about a new 700-page "Hippie Dictionary"
> edited by John Bassett McCleary (Ten-Speed Press).
Not so new, actually. It's the second edition -- the first edition was
discussed here when it came out in 2002:
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=3d5c65679e6e2c4f
> This article lists some sample words:
>
> http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/9244573.htm
>
> What I don't see yet is whether this is merely one guy's personal list
> and definitions (which I suspect) or a serious attempt to gather dated
> citations (which I doubt).
From what I've seen about it, it's not exactly a serious lexicographical
undertaking, but it does seem pretty comprehensive.
> It would be cool if it shed some light on words like "cool".
According to one Amazon customer review of the first edition, the author
apparently has a lot to say about "cool":
McCleary has also starred the entries for the people he
regards as most influential -- e.g. Dr. King -- and the
words/phrases that have had the most impact -- e.g. "cool."
Donna Richoux
> tr...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) wrote:
>
> >It would be cool if it shed some light on words like "cool".
>
> Wasn't 'cool' used before? I thought it went back to the jazz scene
> around 60-ish where people would occasionally refer to each other as
> 'cool cats'.
> But then again, I wasn't really there...
>
Oh, we've had long discussions here about "cool" going back to the 19th
century, even. But in particular, we get fuzzy about what role it played
in the hippie era. Certain persons here think it vanished between the
1950s and the synthetic recreation of that era on a well-known US TV
show, while other persons here think it stayed alive and well, at least
in some geographical and cultural groups.
R H Draney
>
>Oh, we've had long discussions here about "cool" going back to the 19th
>century, even. But in particular, we get fuzzy about what role it played
>in the hippie era. Certain persons here think it vanished between the
>1950s and the synthetic recreation of that era on a well-known US TV
>show, while other persons here think it stayed alive and well, at least
>in some geographical and cultural groups.
Thought extinct but surviving in isolated pockets?...that must be "cool" as in
"coelacanth"....r
Areff
But "cool" *isn't* a hippie word. The hippies rejected "cool". Otherwise
how, in 1974, 1975, could _Happy Days_ have presented it as an archaic
'50s slang word?
--
Ben Zimmer
I have to agree with Areff here. Quoting myself from a past thread:
Bonafide "cool" had to go undercover during the rise of
the hippie counterculture, kept alive by neo-bohemian
proto-punks like the Velvet Underground. An excellent
example of counter-countercultural "cool" is the first
Stooges album (_The Stooges_, 1969), featuring "Real
Cool Time" (with Iggy singing, unironically, "We will
have a real cool time tonight").
It's hard to think of any other appearances of "cool" in
the rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s. Two
songs using "cool" were released in 1971 -- "Long Cool
Woman (In a Black Dress)" by the Hollies and "California
Man" by Them ("We go to a place where the jive is really
cool"), but both were retro efforts by British bands
harking back to rootsy American music of the '50s.
Despite all that, I'd be interested to read McCleary's take on "cool".
Dr. Jai Maharaj
tr...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) posted:
Sanskrit and Hindi speakers have used kool (and anukool) for
thousands of years.
Jai Maharaj, a native Sanskrit and Hindi speaker
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
togg...@hotspot.com
This is a bald face lie. Jay stevens,aka dr. jai etc., is an american
residing in that country and does not speak sanskrit or hindi. When he
thinks a newsgroup might not be aware of his now long newsgroup trolling
career, he will try to pose as an indian born in that country. As his lie
is exposed he retracts his assertions and attacks those bringing to the
light of truth his duplicity. Consider also:
**If you respond to a jay stevens, aka Jai Maharaj, post, often appearing
with multiple links at the end of a posting and having
alt.fan.jai-maharaj, as one of multiple cross posted newsgroups, please be
sure to snip the original message in its entirety.** "Dr. Jai Maharaj"
Information
This person's game is to use news articles to attract people to his
website, where he sells psychic services. He plagues many USENET groups.
His standard method of responding to an attack on his credibility is to
repost the original article or to post the sender's personal contact
information and threaten to report the sender to his/her ISP for spamming
or making threats (the very definition of irony).
Some info re: Jai Maharaj:
mantra.com Mantra Corporation P. O. Box 1919 Honolulu HI, 96792-6919
US IP Address 206.126.0.13 [flex.com] Business Entity Name: MANTRA
CORPORATION Record Type: Master Name for a Domestic Profit Corporation
File Number: 82087 D1 Status: Active Purpose: BUSINESS CONSULTING,
MARKETING,ADVERTISING AND RELATED SERVICES Place Incorporated: Hawaii
UNITED STATES Incorporation Date: 11/30/1990 Mailing Address: P O BOX
1919 WAIANAE Hawaii 96792-6919 United States of America Officer
Information STEVENS,JAY R (possibly "Jai Maharaj") MILLER,JOAN E
(possibly "Harmony") 11/30/1990 Articles of Incorporation
Flex.com 206.126.0.0 - 206.126.15.255 P.O.Box 22481 Honolulu, HI
96823-2481 US
IP Address 206.126.0.13
Administrative Contact: Wong, Delgory K. del@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Flexnet, Inc. Flex Information Network 808.732.8849 HAWAII Email:
postmaster@[EMAIL PROTECT ED] 's First Public Access Internet Provider
IP Address: 199.201.240.1
hindu.org Himalayan Academy *107 Kaholalele Road* Kapaa, HI 11111 US
IP Address 64.75.159.118
Quite a few domains not worth mentioning here...
Links:
http://members.tripod.com/sid_e_slicker/india10.html
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
http://mathquest.com/discuss/sci.math/a/m/387192/387198
His "real" name is supposed to be Jay Stevens.
There is an anti-Jay newsgroup too: news:alt.flame.jay-stevens
But the best place to find Jay is news:alt.fan.jai-maharaj
A member of the "flame Jay Stevens" group is "Jose Mariachi", )another
self-proclaimed "doctor"?)..."Mariachi" web site could be another
bogus cash grab remarkably similar to Stevens' site, mantra.com.
Here's a Jai FAQ [long]
http://www.geocities.com/drjosemariachi/jay_faq.html#bb
Dr. Jai Maharaj
tr...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) posted:
> There are news stories out about a new 700-page "Hippie Dictionary"
> edited by John Bassett McCleary (Ten-Speed Press). This article lists
> some sample words:
>
> http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/9244573.htm
>
> What I don't see yet is whether this is merely one guy's personal list
> and definitions (which I suspect) or a serious attempt to gather dated
> citations (which I doubt).
>
> It would be cool if it shed some light on words like "cool".
Sanskrit and Hindi speakers have used kool (and anukool) for
thousands of years.
Jai Maharaj, a native Sanskrit and Hindi speaker
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
Mike Lyle (GG beta)
Mike.
Richard Maurer
But "cool" *isn't* a hippie word. The hippies rejected "cool".
Otherwise how, in 1974, 1975, could _Happy Days_ have presented it
as an archaic '50s slang word?
The hippies did have a youth culture 'cool', but the predominant use
was with persons.
The door opened and a large man with a beard entered.
Everyone stopped talking until Jim said "He's cool",
and then everyone relaxed.
Here, "he's cool" means "he is one of our type of people
and won't cause any trouble."
This use gained more currency than the 'nifty', 'spiffy', 'keen' sense.
It is time to formulate the Youth Culture One Slang Sense Thesis.
"A youth culture only tolerates one slang sense for each word."
An example of this is how much trouble Young Joey had with 'gay'.
This one-sensing probably happens with everyone, but I think
the effect is stronger when we are the of the age susceptible to
popular music.
(To complicate the 'gay' word, it occurs to me now that perhaps
by the time that 'cheesy gay' arrived, 'homosexual gay' already
seemed like a standard word that had been around since before the
'cheesy gay' users were born -- so there was only one slang sense.)
-- ---------------------------------------------
Richard Maurer To reply, remove half
Sunnyvale, California of a homonym of a synonym for also.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Skitt
> I so like needed you to tell me that. Really.
What? What? Did I miss something?
--
Skitt
Things keep happening that no one can explain.
- Sally Brown (Peanuts).
Ben Zimmer
>
> But "cool" *isn't* a hippie word. The hippies rejected "cool".
> Otherwise how, in 1974, 1975, could _Happy Days_ have presented it as
> an archaic '50s slang word?
Nowadays, usage of "cool" might be thought of as a revival of *'70s*
slang (thanks to the enduring iconic stature of the Fonz). To wit:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08252004/gossip/29447.htm
FORMER P. Diddy personal assistant Fonzworth Bentley
wants the world to know its [sic!] been spelling his name
wrong. Commonly spelled "Farnsworth," the umbrella-wielding
style maven "wanted to make it a little cooler," he said.
"And who's cooler than the Fonz? So I remixed it a little
bit, as we do in hip-hop."
(Mr. Bentley, né Derek Watkins, has parlayed his role as P. Diddy's
Jeevesian "manservant" into an elaborate pseudo-British dandy shtick.
Note that BrE "Farns-" [fA:nz] is roughly homonymous with AmE "Fonz", at
least in its CINC and "ah"-CIC manifestations.)
Cf. also _Pulp Fiction_ (now ten years old, but ahead of its time in its
nostalgia for '70s pop-cultural recyclings of '50s pop culture):
Jules: Nobody's gonna hurt anybody. We're gonna be like
three little Fonzies here. And what's Fonzie like?
Come on Yolanda, what's Fonzie like?
Yolanda: Cool?
Jules: What?
Yolanda: He's cool.
Jules: Correctamundo. And that's what we're gonna be.
We're gonna be cool.
togg...@hotspot.com
This is a bald face lie. Jay stevens,aka dr. jai etc., is an american
Areff
> Areff wrote:
>>
>> But "cool" *isn't* a hippie word. The hippies rejected "cool".
>> Otherwise how, in 1974, 1975, could _Happy Days_ have presented it as
>> an archaic '50s slang word?
>
> Nowadays, usage of "cool" might be thought of as a revival of *'70s*
> slang (thanks to the enduring iconic stature of the Fonz).
> Cf. also _Pulp Fiction_ (now ten years old, but ahead of its time in its
> nostalgia for '70s pop-cultural recyclings of '50s pop culture):
>
> Jules: Nobody's gonna hurt anybody. We're gonna be like
> three little Fonzies here. And what's Fonzie like?
> Come on Yolanda, what's Fonzie like?
> Yolanda: Cool?
> Jules: What?
> Yolanda: He's cool.
> Jules: Correctamundo. And that's what we're gonna be.
> We're gonna be cool.
By the way, that "correctamundo" was also a Fonzie reference -- the Fonz
often used it on _Happy Days_ episodes. I think he used "exactamundo"
too.
I don't really see any of this as a *revival* of the '70s revival, though
I have seen some of that going on in other aspects of the popular culture.
Remember, there were lots of '70s, depending on who you were, as indicated
in the following table:
Type of '70s Exemplary Person Who Knew This '70s
-------------------------- -----------------------------------
Disco '70s Ross Howard
Disco Sucks '70s Evan Kirshenbaum
Fonzie '70s Areff
Match Game PM '70s Tony Cooper
Plato's Retreat '70s Skitt; Dena Jo
Reading _Datamation_ '70s R.J. Valentine
Reading _The Guardian_ '70s John Dean
IBM '70s Truly Donovan; Doc Robin Bignall
and so forth.
--
Dr. Jai Maharaj
tr...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) posted:
> There are news stories out about a new 700-page "Hippie Dictionary"
> edited by John Bassett McCleary (Ten-Speed Press). This article lists
> some sample words:
>
> http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/9244573.htm
>
> What I don't see yet is whether this is merely one guy's personal list
> and definitions (which I suspect) or a serious attempt to gather dated
> citations (which I doubt).
>
> It would be cool if it shed some light on words like "cool".
Sanskrit and Hindi speakers have used kool (and anukool) for
thousands of years.
Jai Maharaj, a native Sanskrit and Hindi speaker
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
togg...@hotspot.com
This is a bald face lie. Jay stevens,aka dr. jai etc., is an american
Dr. Jai Maharaj
tr...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) posted:
> There are news stories out about a new 700-page "Hippie Dictionary"
> edited by John Bassett McCleary (Ten-Speed Press). This article lists
> some sample words:
>
> http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/9244573.htm
>
> What I don't see yet is whether this is merely one guy's personal list
> and definitions (which I suspect) or a serious attempt to gather dated
> citations (which I doubt).
>
> It would be cool if it shed some light on words like "cool".
Sanskrit and Hindi speakers have used kool (and anukool) for
thousands of years.
Jai Maharaj, a native Sanskrit and Hindi speaker
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
Peter Moylan
>Mike Lyle (GG beta) wrote:
>
>> I so like needed you to tell me that. Really.
>
>What? What? Did I miss something?
How could you miss it? He posted it three times.
I'll bet you're one of those subversive people who killfile everything
crossposted to alt.fan.jay-whateverhisnameis.
--
Peter Moylan peter at ee dot newcastle dot edu dot au
http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au (OS/2 and eCS information and software)
Skitt
> Skitt premed:
>> Mike Lyle (GG beta) wrote:
>>> I so like needed you to tell me that. Really.
>>
>> What? What? Did I miss something?
>
> How could you miss it? He posted it three times.
>
> I'll bet you're one of those subversive people who killfile everything
> crossposted to alt.fan.jay-whateverhisnameis.
You've got me pegged.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/
Dylan Nicholson
news:412CD600...@midway.uchicago.edu...
> It's hard to think of any other appearances of "cool" in
> the rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s.
Cool Jerk, The Capitols, 1966.
Contains the line "deep down inside they know I'm cool".
Given I found that after about 2 minutes of searching, there's bound to many
more.
Steve Hayes
>"Jai Maharaj, a native Sanskrit and Hindi speaker"
>
>This is a bald face lie. Jay stevens,aka dr. jai etc., is an american
>residing in that country and does not speak sanskrit or hindi. When he
>thinks a newsgroup might not be aware of his now long newsgroup trolling
>career, he will try to pose as an indian born in that country. As his lie
>is exposed he retracts his assertions and attacks those bringing to the
>light of truth his duplicity. Consider also:
So is he a hippie?
He doesn't seem cool to me.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Ben Zimmer
OK, but by specifying "rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s", I
was trying to limit the discussion to the usage of "cool" by the vaunted
counterculture -- y'know, the hippies and all that. The Capitols were
pop-soul (and their hit was a novelty dance tune), so they don't really
fit the bill.
(I'm going by Robert Christgau's definition of "rock" here: "all music
deriving primarily from the energy and influence of the Beatles -- and
maybe Bob Dylan, and maybe you should stick pretensions in there
someplace." <http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/counter.php>)
Also, I don't consider 1966 to be "the late '60s" quite yet. Another
"cool" song from 1966 was the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City":
Cool town, evening in the city
Dressing so fine and looking so pretty
Cool cat, looking for a kitty
Gonna look in every corner of the city
Even a year later, I'd guess that most self-respecting Summer-of-Love
hippies (including John Sebastian et al.) would have been a little
embarrassed by those lyrics.
Areff
> Dylan Nicholson wrote:
>>
>> "Ben Zimmer" <bgzi...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote in message
>> news:412CD600...@midway.uchicago.edu...
>> > It's hard to think of any other appearances of "cool" in
>> > the rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s.
>>
>> Cool Jerk, The Capitols, 1966.
>>
>> Contains the line "deep down inside they know I'm cool".
>>
>> Given I found that after about 2 minutes of searching, there's bound to many
>> more.
>
> OK, but by specifying "rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s", I
> was trying to limit the discussion to the usage of "cool" by the vaunted
> counterculture -- y'know, the hippies and all that. The Capitols were
> pop-soul (and their hit was a novelty dance tune), so they don't really
> fit the bill.
[...]
> Also, I don't consider 1966 to be "the late '60s" quite yet.
Correctamundo, because 1966 was practically still the '50s. The '60s is
the late '60s, unless you're Edmund Wilson or whatever. Look at the high
school and college yearbooks from 1966. All the guys still had
Eisenhower-era-vintage militaristic crewcuts and those obligatory
horn-rimmed classes. Don't get me started on the female hairstyles.
> Another
> "cool" song from 1966 was the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City":
>
> Cool town, evening in the city
> Dressing so fine and looking so pretty
> Cool cat, looking for a kitty
> Gonna look in every corner of the city
"Cool cat" hearkened back to now-archaic Beatnik slang. "Summer in the
City" was, arguably, an early retro song, in lyrical content if not
musically. As for "cool town", well, let's remember that John Sebastian
was a native of New York (Largest City in America), and it's obvious that
"Summer in the City" is specifically about summertime in *New York* city.
And it does cool down a little bit on summer evenings in New York. So
that's just temperature cool.
And it is no coincidence that John Sebastian later came to be known for
the 1970s hit "Welcome Back", the theme song to the watershed sitcom
_Welcome Back Kotter_, which took place in 1970s Brooklyn (Fourth Largest
City in America) and famously featured the Belt Parkway sign in the
opening sequence that said
WELCOME TO BROOKLYN
4TH LARGEST CITY IN AMERICA
SEBASTIAN LEONE, BOROUGH PRESIDENT
Consider these pernts, Zimms:
(1) The character Vinny Barbarino (John Travolta) was always singing
"Bar-bar-bar, bar-bar-barino" to the tune of "Barbara Ann", first recorded
by the Regents in 1961. "Barbara Ann" is a "fifties"-sounding song,
having early-rock'n'roll musical characteristics.
(2) Travolta went from _Welcome Back Kotter_ to star in the movie version
of _Grease_, the second most important cinematic manifestation of the '70s
retro movement (the first being _American Graffiti_).
(3) Travolta went from _Grease_ to _Saturday Night Fever_, the most
important cinematic manifestation of the '70s disco movement. It's been
argued that disco itself was as retro a musical phenomenon as the
contemporaneous punk.
From all this we can conclude that John Sebastian and "Welcome Back" were
part of the retro-'50s movement of the '70s. It follows that the Lovin'
Spoonful foreshadowed the retro-'50s movement in "Summer in the City",
which, like "Welcome Back", was a song about New York (though "Welcome
Back" was specifically about Brooklyn and "Summer in the City" was
probably about Greenwich Village).
> Even a year later, I'd guess that most self-respecting Summer-of-Love
> hippies (including John Sebastian et al.) would have been a little
> embarrassed by those lyrics.
Yes. But vide supra.
I'm sure this is really what was going on: the hippies were kids who'd
been using "cool" when they were younger, and they came to associate
"cool" with that shameful part of their past, when they still had short
hair and still took baths and wore underwear and supported military
intervention in Indochina and so forth. "Cool" was no longer "cool".
The stage was set; conditions were ripe for revolution, the first shots of
which were fired in 1974.
--
Maria Conlon
[much snipped, just for space reasons; see Areff's post]
>
> I'm sure this is really what was going on: the hippies were kids
> who'd been using "cool" when they were younger, and they came to
> associate "cool" with that shameful part of their past, when they
> still had short hair and still took baths and wore underwear and
> supported military intervention in Indochina and so forth. "Cool"
> was no longer "cool".
> The stage was set; conditions were ripe for revolution, the first
> shots of which were fired in 1974.
What I find amazing is that I actually lived through the decades you
speak of. Maybe I was too close to it all to notice the big picture
you present.
"Cool" was never associated with anything shameful, IMO. But I was
still taking baths and wearing underwear, which probably messed up
my thinking. More likely: I just wasn't paying attention. The 1960s
sort of encouraged not paying attention, or something like that.
Maria Conlon
Richard Maurer
Donna Richoux wrote:
There are news stories out about a new 700-page "Hippie Dictionary"
edited by John Bassett McCleary (Ten-Speed Press).
This article lists some sample words:
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/9244573.htm
What I don't see yet is whether this is merely one guy's
personal list and definitions (which I suspect) or a
serious attempt to gather dated citations (which I doubt).
It would be cool if it shed some light on words like "cool".
I took a look at it tonight. The book is half encyclopedia type
articles of important people and events of the time; and half
dictionary, with many phrases. The type density is paperback
density rather than dictionary density. The definitions are of
a middling quality. He does say that he spent eight years on the
project, mostly in libraries.
As for "cool", he marks it as one of the 100 most important words,
and says that while it was alive in the 1950s, it was the hippies
that made the word important. While he gave significant space to it,
but did not go into the different senses of the word.
While flipping through, the only unfamiliar phrase was
"cut a break", which is similar to "give me a break".
The author was age 60, whenever the blurb was written.
Charles Riggs
>Ben Zimmer wrote:
>> Also, I don't consider 1966 to be "the late '60s" quite yet.
>
>Correctamundo, because 1966 was practically still the '50s.
Uncorrectamundo, in fact Totally, Irretrievably, and Dead Wrong. By
1965 even everything had changed. Right wing was out, left wing was
in, Doris Day type music was gone, rock `n roll had become part of our
souls, it became acceptable to publicly kiss people of other races,
many of us were no longer ashamed of being naked, we had sex with
strangers, the popularity of oral sex exploded, we took drugs, we said
'fuck' when we liked, and, most importantly, we were questioning
everything that went on in society. Nothing about the mid-sixties was
anything like the sorry-assed days of the fifties.
Areff
> As for "cool", he marks it as one of the 100 most important words,
> and says that while it was alive in the 1950s, it was the hippies
> that made the word important.
Ridiculous!
--
Donna Richoux
> Areff wrote:
> But "cool" *isn't* a hippie word. The hippies rejected "cool".
> Otherwise how, in 1974, 1975, could _Happy Days_ have presented it
> as an archaic '50s slang word?
>
>
> The hippies did have a youth culture 'cool', but the predominant use
> was with persons.
>
> The door opened and a large man with a beard entered.
> Everyone stopped talking until Jim said "He's cool",
> and then everyone relaxed.
>
> Here, "he's cool" means "he is one of our type of people
> and won't cause any trouble."
That is a very good observation, and it may be exactly the link that
brought the word forward to the next era. To say, "Don't worry, he's
cool" *was* to give a seal of approval. The group's standards would not
have been those of the "square establishment." "He won't report our drug
use to the authorities, so relax" is probably the sense. It was only a
slight shift to "That's cool," also meaning, "approved, acceptable."
As I've said in early go-rounds with Richard, before that, I can
remember "cool" being not-quite-approving, describing the tough kids who
smoked and got into trouble. It depends on who was using the word, which
viewpoint, whether it involved approval or not.
>
> This use gained more currency than the 'nifty', 'spiffy', 'keen' sense.
You lose me a little, there. "Nifty," "spiffy," and "keen" have always
been slightly comical, to me. Dated, like "peachy." I might use them,
particularly to convey a sort of innocent enthusiasm, but I don't see
that "cool" has *ever* had those qualities, then or now. Can you
explain?
Maybe you're just referring to the fact that "cool" has become so
widespread today that it is just "good" in any sense, unrelated to
nuance.
>
> It is time to formulate the Youth Culture One Slang Sense Thesis.
> "A youth culture only tolerates one slang sense for each word."
>
> An example of this is how much trouble Young Joey had with 'gay'.
>
> This one-sensing probably happens with everyone, but I think
> the effect is stronger when we are the of the age susceptible to
> popular music.
>
>
> (To complicate the 'gay' word, it occurs to me now that perhaps
> by the time that 'cheesy gay' arrived, 'homosexual gay' already
> seemed like a standard word that had been around since before the
> 'cheesy gay' users were born -- so there was only one slang sense.)
Well, that's what DE781 or someone said, they assumed the negative
version of "gay" derived from some older sense than homosexuality. They
could allow more than one meaning to the word because they didn't feel
it was the same word.
I have to dispute the "cheesy" thing -- that seems to be DE781's own
personal spin. Maybe "gay" passed through that stage on its way to
"bad," pure and simple, but so far I've seen no evidence that that is
still true. (Now he'll post insistence that is is, but will he give
evidence? No.)
--
Best - Donna Richoux
Ross Howard
Yes. It's ridiculous even for BrE. "Cool" went out when "gear" and
"groovy" came in, stayed out in the cold throughout the "fab", "great"
and "brill" eras of the following two decades, and only made its
return -- initially as a slightly arch variant of "(well) wicked" --
in the early-mid '90s.
In BrHippyE, the most important adjectives for Good Things were
probably be "freaky" and "far out". Anyone who used "cool" wasn't.
Man.
--
Ross Howard
Ben Zimmer
>
> Ben Zimmer wrote:
> > Another "cool" song from 1966 was the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in
> > the City":
> >
> > Cool town, evening in the city
> > Dressing so fine and looking so pretty
> > Cool cat, looking for a kitty
> > Gonna look in every corner of the city
>
> "Cool cat" hearkened back to now-archaic Beatnik slang. "Summer in the
> City" was, arguably, an early retro song, in lyrical content if not
>
> And it is no coincidence that John Sebastian later came to be known for
> the 1970s hit "Welcome Back", the theme song to the watershed sitcom
>
[snip evidence of _WBK_'s retro-ness]
>
> From all this we can conclude that John Sebastian and "Welcome Back" were
> part of the retro-'50s movement of the '70s. It follows that the Lovin'
> Spoonful foreshadowed the retro-'50s movement in "Summer in the City",
> which, like "Welcome Back", was a song about New York (though "Welcome
> Back" was specifically about Brooklyn and "Summer in the City" was
> probably about Greenwich Village).
Then John Sebastian was the exception that proved the rule: a
countercultural type (heck, he even played Woodstock) who didn't turn
his back on '50s "cool". (Though it could be argued that he kept quiet
about it between 1966 and 1975, when _WBK_ premiered.)
Using 1966 as the inception of '50s revivalism, I find these data
points, focusing on the usage of "cool" as a bellwether for retro-ness:
1966: The Lovin' Spoonful (and the Capitols) sing about "cool cats"
1966-69: NBC airs the cartoon _Cool McCool_, a James Bond spoof
1969: At Woodstock, Sha Na Na sing "At the Hop" by Danny & the Juniors
("...and the music is the coolest at the hop")
1971: Daddy Cool, Australia's answer to Sha Na Na, release the album
_Daddy Who? Daddy Cool!_
1971?: Snoopy's alter ego Joe Cool is introduced
1972: The Move sing '50s tribute "California Man": "We go to a place
where the jive is really cool" (covered by Cheap Trick in 1978)
1972: The Hollies' rootsy "Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)" peaks
at #2 on the US pop charts
1973: _American Graffiti_ ("cool" usage?)
1974: _Happy Days_ premieres (rampant "cool" usage by the Fonz)
1975: _Welcome Back Kotter_ premieres ("cool" usage?)
1978: _Grease_ (Danny: "Oh, that's cool, baby.")
1978: British pub-rocker Nick Lowe releases album _Jesus of Cool_
1980: The cartoon _The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang_ premieres,
featuring the Fonz's sidekick dog, Mr. Cool
1982: _Grease 2_ ("The Pink Lady pledge is to act cool, to look cool
and to be cool, till death do us part.")
1982: Moon-Unit Zappa's "Valley Girl" ("It'll be like really cool.")
1982: _Fast Times at Ridgemont High_ (Spicoli: "All I need are some
tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine.")
Starting around 1982, "cool" no longer necessarily signified retro-ness.
As we've previously established [1], "cool" passed into general usage
amongst young AmE speakers at the time, particularly those following the
Southern Californian trends captured by "Valley Girl" and _FTaRH_.
[1]
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3EB3EB2E...@midway.uchicago.edu
Richard Maurer
Here, "he's cool" means "he is one of our type of people
and won't cause any trouble."
This use gained more currency than the 'nifty',
'spiffy', 'keen' sense.
Donna Richoux wrote:
You lose me a little, there. "Nifty," "spiffy," and "keen" have
always been slightly comical, to me. Dated, like "peachy." I might
use them, particularly to convey a sort of innocent enthusiasm,
but I don't see that "cool" has *ever* had those qualities,
then or now. Can you explain?
I was referring to the fact that each generation has its own
most excellent word of approval. Recently it was 'kewl'
(what is it now?), before that it was 'rad', 'cool', ... .
Go back farther and there was a time when it 'nifty', 'spiffy',
or 'keen', and for the teenagers of that time it was not dated
at all, it was the most current thing. I think there was a
sense of 'cool' that did have the qualities you mentioned,
especially when it could be applied to things.
"Come see Tom's cool new motorcycle."
It could also be applied to situations.
"It's cool that we can drink Dr. Pepper in class."
but I will let someone else fill in the timeline for these.
rzed
[... Areff's disquisition on retro/cool, etc.]
>
> Using 1966 as the inception of '50s revivalism, I find these
> data points, focusing on the usage of "cool" as a bellwether for
> retro-ness:
>
> 1966: The Lovin' Spoonful (and the Capitols) sing about "cool
> cats" 1966-69: NBC airs the cartoon _Cool McCool_, a James Bond
> spoof 1969: At Woodstock, Sha Na Na sing "At the Hop" by Danny &
> the Juniors
> ("...and the music is the coolest at the hop")
[... more of the timeline...]
Clearly, Marshall McLuhan's influence is a factor in the use or
disuse of "cool". _Understanding Media_ came out in 1964, and for a
few years McLuhan was The Man in certain intellectual circles. His
influence could particularly be seen among the Hippies, I'd say.
The "dispassionate" sense of cool fell out of favor, and a general
embrace of "hot" qualities (in media, per McLuhan, and in the
psyche) became an ideal.
Talk of The Revolution among most of the 60's generation was not
actually political in nature, but spiritual or psychological; it
was a reaction against the death-in-life of the 50's. "Cool" -- the
iconic 50's construct -- could not survive in the hothouse. It
wasn't until the media normalized the hot impulse that it became
controllable, and cooled down again. Seen in this light, Sha-na-na
and the rest were the vanguard of the normalization effort.
--
rzed
R H Draney
>
>On 26 Aug 2004 06:57:43 GMT, Areff <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
>
>>Ben Zimmer wrote:
>
>>> Also, I don't consider 1966 to be "the late '60s" quite yet.
>>
>>Correctamundo, because 1966 was practically still the '50s.
>
>Uncorrectamundo, in fact Totally, Irretrievably, and Dead Wrong. By
>1965 even everything had changed. Right wing was out, left wing was
>in, Doris Day type music was gone, rock `n roll had become part of our
Among those songs reaching number one on the Billboard chart in 1966:
"My Love" by Petula Clark
"Lightnin' Strikes" by Lou Christie
"These Boots Are Made For Walking" by Nancy Sinatra
"The Ballad of the Green Beret" by SSgt Barry Sadler
"Soul and Inspiration" by the Righteous Brothers
"When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge
"Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra
"Hanky Panky" by Tommy James & the Shondells
"Wild Thing" by the Troggs
"Cherish" by the Association
"Poor Side of Town" by Johnny Rivers
If you put all of those on a movie soundtrack today, you'd better set the pic in
the fifties, release dates be hanged....
(And if that's not retro enough, December 1966 opened with the New Vaudeville
Band's recording of "Winchester Cathedral"; in at least some isolated enclaves,
1966 was still the 1920s)....r
R H Draney
>
>Using 1966 as the inception of '50s revivalism, I find these data
>points, focusing on the usage of "cool" as a bellwether for retro-ness:
>
>1966: The Lovin' Spoonful (and the Capitols) sing about "cool cats"
>1966-69: NBC airs the cartoon _Cool McCool_, a James Bond spoof
>1969: At Woodstock, Sha Na Na sing "At the Hop" by Danny & the Juniors
> ("...and the music is the coolest at the hop")
>1971: Daddy Cool, Australia's answer to Sha Na Na, release the album
> _Daddy Who? Daddy Cool!_
>1971?: Snoopy's alter ego Joe Cool is introduced
>1972: The Move sing '50s tribute "California Man": "We go to a place
> where the jive is really cool" (covered by Cheap Trick in 1978)
>1972: The Hollies' rootsy "Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)" peaks
> at #2 on the US pop charts
1971: _Jesus Christ Superstar_ premieres at the Mark Hellinger Theatre in
NYC...in the song "This Jesus Must Die", Caiaphas grudgingly admits his
admiration for his nemesis: "One thing I'll say for him, Jesus is cool"....r
Chris Malcolm
>>Ridiculous!
Exactly. "Cool" was a beatnik term. See Kerouac. It wasn't cool for
hippies to use "cool", and when hippies became fashionable it became
uncool to be a beatnik. Some beatniks camouflaged themselves as
hippies and became the apparently hippie entrepreneurs who got rich
selling hippie gear and events to the hippies.
--
Chris Malcolm c...@infirmatics.ed.ac.uk +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]
Dena Jo
> By 1965 even everything had changed.
I have my sister's yearbook from '65, the year she graduated from
high school. Almost all the girls still had beehive hairdos and wore
long skirts. The boys had short hair.
Things began to change in '66.
By '67, we were living in a different world.
--
Dena Jo
Email goes to denajo2 at the dot com variation of the Yahoo domain.
Have I confused you? Go here:
http://myweb.cableone.net/denajo/emailme.htm
Areff
> Richard Maurer <rcpb1_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Areff wrote:
>> But "cool" *isn't* a hippie word. The hippies rejected "cool".
>> Otherwise how, in 1974, 1975, could _Happy Days_ have presented it
>> as an archaic '50s slang word?
>>
>>
>> The hippies did have a youth culture 'cool', but the predominant use
>> was with persons.
>>
>> The door opened and a large man with a beard entered.
>> Everyone stopped talking until Jim said "He's cool",
>> and then everyone relaxed.
>>
>> Here, "he's cool" means "he is one of our type of people
>> and won't cause any trouble."
>
> That is a very good observation, and it may be exactly the link that
> brought the word forward to the next era.
What next era? It seems to me that the next era was that of the children
of the 1970s watching _Happy Days_ and idolizing The Fonz. The Fonz's
notion of "cool" is much closer to the modern usage than is this narrow
hippie use of "trustworthily hip" cool.
You have to be able to make a link from the old era to the modern era.
One plausible link is the Fonzie link: that is, "cool" continuity was
disrupted as hippies largely rejected "cool", and then it was revived by
way of the popularity of _Happy Days_.
The Maurer Thesis makes no similarly plausible link. Maurer is from the
Bay Area [sic], IIRC, like you. I think being from the Bay Area [sic] may
cloud one's judgment on this issue of "cool" history. Everywhere
*outside* of the Bay Area [sic] (and maybe a few other West Coast
Outposts) there was a general reaction against the hippie culture,
beginning around 1970. This reaction took on many forms (e.g.,
disco movement, punk movement, "Jesus Freak" movement, women's liberation
[remember that the hippies, like the Beats before them, were famously
misogynist], rise of Reaganism, ascendancy of the New South [cf. _The
Dukes of Hazzard_], gradual reduction in average male hair length,
gradual reduction in tendency of people to wear colors like purple,
gradual decline in popularity of tie-dying, Retro '50s Revivalism, etc.).
People who've mainly been in the Bay Area [sic] or similar places like the
Netherlands understandably missed out on these influential social
movements, whatever their underlying merit or lack thereof.
So, given that there was this anti-hippieism throughout American culture
(outside of the Bay Area [sic]), it's absurd to suggest that the narrow
hippie use of 'cool' could have had any post-hippie influence.
--
Areff
> On 26 Aug 2004 08:09:00 GMT, Areff <m...@privacy.net> wrought:
>
>>Richard Maurer wrote:
>>> As for "cool", he marks it as one of the 100 most important words,
>>> and says that while it was alive in the 1950s, it was the hippies
>>> that made the word important.
>>
>>Ridiculous!
>
> Yes. It's ridiculous even for BrE. "Cool" went out when "gear" and
> "groovy" came in, stayed out in the cold throughout the "fab", "great"
> and "brill" eras of the following two decades, and only made its
> return -- initially as a slightly arch variant of "(well) wicked" --
> in the early-mid '90s.
Yes -- ten years at most after the revival in the US, which is consistent
with the Kojak Thesis[TM].
--
Areff
> Exactly. "Cool" was a beatnik term. See Kerouac. It wasn't cool for
> hippies to use "cool", and when hippies became fashionable it became
> uncool to be a beatnik.
Correctamundo. This, by the way, was what was so historically silly about
Fonzie being associated with "cool". Fonzie wasn't a Beatnik. He was a
Greaser. (There was one _Happy Days_ episode that featured Beatniks --
Richie had a date with a Beatnik girl.)
--
Richard Maurer
But "cool" *isn't* a hippie word. The hippies rejected "cool".
Otherwise how, in 1974, 1975, could _Happy Days_ have presented it
as an archaic '50s slang word?
Ben Zimmer wrote downthread:
OK, but by specifying "rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s",
I was trying to limit the discussion to the usage of "cool" by
the vaunted counterculture -- y'know, the hippies and all that.
It is hard to find material with dates. I was looking for quotes
of Rolling Stones articles. Most of the ones I happened upon were
referring to *looking* cool. But here is one that shows to me
that it was also a general word of approval in 1971 counter-culture.
Thursday 21st January 1971
John Lennon and Yoko Ono talk to Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali
for their underground magazine "Red mole".
RB: That's a pretty cool idea - the Working Class becomes
its own Hero. As long as it was not a new comforting illusion,
as long as there was a real workers' power. If a capitalist or
bureaucrat is running your life then you need
to compensate with illusions.
Areff
> Areff wrote:
>>
>> And it is no coincidence that John Sebastian later came to be known for
>> the 1970s hit "Welcome Back", the theme song to the watershed sitcom
>> _Welcome Back Kotter_ [...]
>>
> [snip evidence of _WBK_'s retro-ness]
Another thing is that the theme of _Welcome Back Kotter_ (the
subject-matter theme, I mean) echoed the whole _Blackboard Jungle_ sort of
thing, which was of course closely associated with the '50s.
> Using 1966 as the inception of '50s revivalism, I find these data
> points, focusing on the usage of "cool" as a bellwether for retro-ness:
>
> 1966: The Lovin' Spoonful (and the Capitols) sing about "cool cats"
> 1966-69: NBC airs the cartoon _Cool McCool_, a James Bond spoof
> 1969: At Woodstock, Sha Na Na sing "At the Hop" by Danny & the Juniors
> ("...and the music is the coolest at the hop")
> 1971: Daddy Cool, Australia's answer to Sha Na Na, release the album
> _Daddy Who? Daddy Cool!_
> 1971?: Snoopy's alter ego Joe Cool is introduced
> 1972: The Move sing '50s tribute "California Man": "We go to a place
> where the jive is really cool" (covered by Cheap Trick in 1978)
> 1972: The Hollies' rootsy "Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)" peaks
> at #2 on the US pop charts
> 1973: _American Graffiti_ ("cool" usage?)
> 1974: _Happy Days_ premieres (rampant "cool" usage by the Fonz)
> 1975: _Welcome Back Kotter_ premieres ("cool" usage?)
For anyone who still thinks it's a stretch to regard _Welcome Back Kotter_
as part of this retro/'50s revivalist movement, we should also remember
that _WBK_ was itself inspired by _Happy Days_. (I found convincing
evidence of this in some ProQuest research I did a while back.)
> Starting around 1982, "cool" no longer necessarily signified retro-ness.
You are correct, sir. 1982 is when *I* first noticed the new, non-ironic
usage of "cool" (July or August of 1982, specifically). It wasn't until
1985 that I really noticed it being used extensively (and, significantly,
at that time I noticed it being used by high school classmates in the two
grades below mine, made up principally of kids born in 1969 and 1970).
--
Steve Hayes
>Among those songs reaching number one on the Billboard chart in 1966:
>
>"My Love" by Petula Clark
>"Lightnin' Strikes" by Lou Christie
>"These Boots Are Made For Walking" by Nancy Sinatra
>"The Ballad of the Green Beret" by SSgt Barry Sadler
>"Soul and Inspiration" by the Righteous Brothers
>"When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge
>"Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra
>"Hanky Panky" by Tommy James & the Shondells
>"Wild Thing" by the Troggs
>"Cherish" by the Association
>"Poor Side of Town" by Johnny Rivers
>
>If you put all of those on a movie soundtrack today, you'd better set the pic in
>the fifties, release dates be hanged....
In late 1966 I was listening mainly to the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and the
Beatles (Eleanor Rigby and others on the "Revolver" album).
Carmen L. Abruzzi
> Areff wrote:
> But "cool" *isn't* a hippie word. The hippies rejected "cool".
> Otherwise how, in 1974, 1975, could _Happy Days_ have presented it
> as an archaic '50s slang word?
>
>
> The hippies did have a youth culture 'cool', but the predominant use
> was with persons.
>
> The door opened and a large man with a beard entered.
> Everyone stopped talking until Jim said "He's cool",
> and then everyone relaxed.
>
> Here, "he's cool" means "he is one of our type of people
> and won't cause any trouble."
>
> This use gained more currency than the 'nifty', 'spiffy', 'keen' sense.
This is the sense we used in Pennsylvania in the mid-70s.
Except it was more often used of places or situations than
people. And usually had to do with drinking beer or smoking
cogarettes of one kind or another. An example might be, oh,
say:
"let's drink it here in this old garage"
"but it's right next to the police station"
"it's cool, they never look in here"
The word for "nifty, spiffy, keen" was, believe it or not,
"decent".
>
> It is time to formulate the Youth Culture One Slang Sense Thesis.
> "A youth culture only tolerates one slang sense for each word."
>
> An example of this is how much trouble Young Joey had with 'gay'.
>
> This one-sensing probably happens with everyone, but I think
> the effect is stronger when we are the of the age susceptible to
> popular music.
>
>
> (To complicate the 'gay' word, it occurs to me now that perhaps
> by the time that 'cheesy gay' arrived, 'homosexual gay' already
> seemed like a standard word that had been around since before the
> 'cheesy gay' users were born -- so there was only one slang sense.)
>
Donna Richoux
> Areff wrote:
> But "cool" *isn't* a hippie word. The hippies rejected "cool".
> Otherwise how, in 1974, 1975, could _Happy Days_ have presented it
> as an archaic '50s slang word?
>
>
> Ben Zimmer wrote downthread:
> OK, but by specifying "rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s",
> I was trying to limit the discussion to the usage of "cool" by
> the vaunted counterculture -- y'know, the hippies and all that.
>
>
> It is hard to find material with dates. I was looking for quotes
> of Rolling Stones articles. Most of the ones I happened upon were
> referring to *looking* cool. But here is one that shows to me
> that it was also a general word of approval in 1971 counter-culture.
>
> Thursday 21st January 1971
> John Lennon and Yoko Ono talk to Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali
> for their underground magazine "Red mole".
>
> RB: That's a pretty cool idea - the Working Class becomes
> its own Hero. As long as it was not a new comforting illusion,
> as long as there was a real workers' power. If a capitalist or
> bureaucrat is running your life then you need
> to compensate with illusions.
You'll confuse them with facts, Richard. Their minds are made up.
Now the other Richard will argue that whoever this Blackburn person was,
he obviously didn't count. Not hip enough, or genuine enough, or he had
the wrong hair color, or something. Data points that contradict a theory
must be flawed, right?
--
Coolly -- Donna Richoux
R H Draney
>
>Ben Zimmer wrote:
>> Areff wrote:
>>>
>>> And it is no coincidence that John Sebastian later came to be known for
>>> the 1970s hit "Welcome Back", the theme song to the watershed sitcom
>>> _Welcome Back Kotter_ [...]
>>>
>> [snip evidence of _WBK_'s retro-ness]
>
>Another thing is that the theme of _Welcome Back Kotter_ (the
>subject-matter theme, I mean) echoed the whole _Blackboard Jungle_ sort of
>thing, which was of course closely associated with the '50s.
>
>
>For anyone who still thinks it's a stretch to regard _Welcome Back Kotter_
>as part of this retro/'50s revivalist movement, we should also remember
>that _WBK_ was itself inspired by _Happy Days_. (I found convincing
>evidence of this in some ProQuest research I did a while back.)
Kotter was also based on Gabe Kaplan's standup act, which in turn referred
heavily to his own schooldays...he refers to sixth grade in the routine (don't
make me upload the MP3) which suggests someone about twelve years old, which
Kaplan would have been in 1957...people named Vinnie Barbarino and Arnold
Horshack were classmates of Kaplan's, or at least so the standup would have you
believe....r
don groves
haye...@hotmail.com wrote...
> On 26 Aug 2004 07:08:35 -0700, R H Draney <dado...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> >Among those songs reaching number one on the Billboard chart in 1966:
> >
> >"My Love" by Petula Clark
> >"Lightnin' Strikes" by Lou Christie
> >"These Boots Are Made For Walking" by Nancy Sinatra
> >"The Ballad of the Green Beret" by SSgt Barry Sadler
> >"Soul and Inspiration" by the Righteous Brothers
> >"When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge
> >"Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra
> >"Hanky Panky" by Tommy James & the Shondells
> >"Wild Thing" by the Troggs
> >"Cherish" by the Association
> >"Poor Side of Town" by Johnny Rivers
> >
> >If you put all of those on a movie soundtrack today, you'd better set the pic in
> >the fifties, release dates be hanged....
>
> In late 1966 I was listening mainly to the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and the
> Beatles (Eleanor Rigby and others on the "Revolver" album).
Absolutamundo. Those 'hit parade' songs were popular with
the older folks, not those of us in our teens and twenties.
And the best take on 'cool' has always been Joe Cool, aka
Snoopy. More than any other characteristic, 'cool' was laid
back, as in cool jazz vs. hot jazz.
--
dg
don groves
ggu...@yahoo.com wrote...
And don't leave out West Coast jazz as a premier breeding
ground for 'cool'.
--
dg
Areff
>> of Rolling Stones articles. Most of the ones I happened upon were
>> referring to *looking* cool. But here is one that shows to me
>> that it was also a general word of approval in 1971 counter-culture.
>>
>> Thursday 21st January 1971
>> John Lennon and Yoko Ono talk to Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali
>> for their underground magazine "Red mole".
>>
>> RB: That's a pretty cool idea - the Working Class becomes
>> its own Hero. As long as it was not a new comforting illusion,
>> as long as there was a real workers' power. If a capitalist or
>> bureaucrat is running your life then you need
>> to compensate with illusions.
>
> You'll confuse them with facts, Richard. Their minds are made up.
>
> Now the other Richard will argue that whoever this Blackburn person was,
> he obviously didn't count. Not hip enough, or genuine enough, or he had
> the wrong hair color, or something. Data points that contradict a theory
> must be flawed, right?
Well, I figure he's probably British, for one thing, so remember the Kojak
Thesis[TM].
But anyway, we see this problem with the lexicographers too. They don't
look for the big picture. They're not historians. A historian could
collect a whole lot of evidence and see that while, yes, a few people were
still using "cool" here and there, "cool" had definitely become moribund
by the late '60s, and "cool" had also begun to be associated with a very
different, albeit not very distant, past epoch, rather like "swell" might
have seemed in 1960.
--
Areff
> Areff filted:
>>
>>Another thing is that the theme of _Welcome Back Kotter_ (the
>>subject-matter theme, I mean) echoed the whole _Blackboard Jungle_ sort of
>>thing, which was of course closely associated with the '50s.
>>
>>> 1975: _Welcome Back Kotter_ premieres ("cool" usage?)
>>
>>For anyone who still thinks it's a stretch to regard _Welcome Back Kotter_
>>as part of this retro/'50s revivalist movement, we should also remember
>>that _WBK_ was itself inspired by _Happy Days_. (I found convincing
>>evidence of this in some ProQuest research I did a while back.)
>
> Kotter was also based on Gabe Kaplan's standup act, which in turn referred
> heavily to his own schooldays...he refers to sixth grade in the routine (don't
> make me upload the MP3) which suggests someone about twelve years old, which
> Kaplan would have been in 1957...people named Vinnie Barbarino and Arnold
> Horshack were classmates of Kaplan's, or at least so the standup would have you
> believe....r
Good pernts. The whole gist of the show, and it's even reflected in the
lyrics to the theme song, is that this teacher has returned to the
neighborhood he grew up in, and is teaching kids who were like the kid he
used to be. Kotter was an ex-sweathog. Even setting the show in Brooklyn
may be significant in this regard. Brooklyn was closely associated with
earlier epochs (the early postwar era and the Wartime era, say).
Next topic: The Crypto-Retroness of _What's Happening!_. Hey hi hey!
--
Areff
> And the best take on 'cool' has always been Joe Cool, aka
> Snoopy. More than any other characteristic, 'cool' was laid
> back, as in cool jazz vs. hot jazz.
Cool jazz being a musical style of the early 1950s, note.
--
Ben Zimmer
What, only beatniks were cool in the '50s? What about the antiheroic
T-shirt-and-leather-jacket cool of Marlon Brando in _The Wild One_,
James Dean in _Rebel Without a Cause_, or Vic Morrow in _Blackboard
Jungle_? How about Gene Vincent singing "Be-Bop-A-Lula", or Eddie
Cochran singing "Summertime Blues"? Those were the icons of rebellious
cool that the Fonz diluted into a harmless, lovable form.
Hmm, I see I'm repeating an argument Donna had with you a few years ago:
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1eumxrs.dcdpjfp310j9N%tr...@euronet.nl
Skitt
> Dylan Nicholson wrote:
>> "Ben Zimmer" wrote:
>>> It's hard to think of any other appearances of "cool" in
>>> the rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s.
>>
>> Cool Jerk, The Capitols, 1966.
>>
>> Contains the line "deep down inside they know I'm cool".
>>
>> Given I found that after about 2 minutes of searching, there's bound
>> to many more.
>
> OK, but by specifying "rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s", I
> was trying to limit the discussion to the usage of "cool" by the
> vaunted counterculture -- y'know, the hippies and all that. The
> Capitols were pop-soul (and their hit was a novelty dance tune), so
> they don't really fit the bill.
>
> (I'm going by Robert Christgau's definition of "rock" here: "all music
> deriving primarily from the energy and influence of the Beatles -- and
> maybe Bob Dylan, and maybe you should stick pretensions in there
> someplace." <http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/counter.php>)
>
> Also, I don't consider 1966 to be "the late '60s" quite yet. Another
> "cool" song from 1966 was the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City":
>
> Cool town, evening in the city
> Dressing so fine and looking so pretty
> Cool cat, looking for a kitty
> Gonna look in every corner of the city
>
> Even a year later, I'd guess that most self-respecting Summer-of-Love
> hippies (including John Sebastian et al.) would have been a little
> embarrassed by those lyrics.
OK, here's rock from 1959:
CHARLIE BROWN
(Jerry Leiber - Mike Stoller)
THE COASTERS (ATCO 6132, 1959)
Fe fe fi fi fo fo fum
I smell smoke in the auditorium
[Chorus]
Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown
He's a clown, that Charlie Brown
He's gonna get caught; just you wait and see
(Why's everybody always pickin' on me?)
That's him on his knees, I know that's him
Yeah, from 7 come 11 down in the boys' gym
[Chorus]
Who's always writing on the wall?
Who's always goofin' in the hall?
Who's always throwin' spit balls?
Guess who (Who, me?) Yeah, you!
Who walks in the classroom, cool and slow?
Who calls the English teacher Daddy-O?
[Chorus]
--
Skitt (in SF Bay Area)
... and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped.
-- Sir Bedevere
Ben Zimmer
I don't really know the musical, but that sounds like it could be the
sense of "cool" meaning "assured and unabashed" (as in "cool customer"),
rather than "cool" as a generic term of approbation associated with the
'50s. In any case, I don't think there was anything retro about that
usage.
Another data point I neglected (though I mentioned it elsethread) is the
1969 song "Real Cool Time" by Iggy and the Stooges ("We will have a real
cool time tonight"). I don't see this as necessarily retro, though Iggy
did presage the stripped-down ethos of the punk movement that rejected
the excesses of the counterculture for the straight-ahead power of '50s
rock 'n' roll. (The Ramones, the retro-est of punk bands, later covered
"Real Cool Time" and also sang "Gonna have a real cool time and
everything's gonna be real fine" in their 1977 song "Swallow My Pride".)
Mike Lyle
> On 26 Aug 2004, Charles Riggs posted thus:
>
> > By 1965 even everything had changed.
>
> I have my sister's yearbook from '65, the year she graduated from
> high school. Almost all the girls still had beehive hairdos and wore
> long skirts. The boys had short hair.
>
> Things began to change in '66.
>
> By '67, we were living in a different world.
Yep, in 1967, Pavarotti was good, and de Souzay and Glenn Gould hadn't
backed off; Muenchinger was a cult figure, and you had to use violence
to get tickets for Fischer-Dieskau. Heady days! (I can still hardly
believe I didn't see Nureyev till the 'eighties.)
Mike.
Areff
> Areff wrote:
>>
>> Chris Malcolm wrote:
>> > Exactly. "Cool" was a beatnik term. See Kerouac. It wasn't cool for
>> > hippies to use "cool", and when hippies became fashionable it became
>> > uncool to be a beatnik.
>>
>> Correctamundo. This, by the way, was what was so historically silly about
>> Fonzie being associated with "cool". Fonzie wasn't a Beatnik. He was a
>> Greaser. (There was one _Happy Days_ episode that featured Beatniks --
>> Richie had a date with a Beatnik girl.)
>
> What, only beatniks were cool in the '50s? What about the antiheroic
> T-shirt-and-leather-jacket cool of Marlon Brando in _The Wild One_,
> James Dean in _Rebel Without a Cause_, or Vic Morrow in _Blackboard
> Jungle_? How about Gene Vincent singing "Be-Bop-A-Lula", or Eddie
> Cochran singing "Summertime Blues"? Those were the icons of rebellious
> cool that the Fonz diluted into a harmless, lovable form.
Indeed, but were they called "cool" at the time? That I do not know.
--
R H Draney
>
>In article <412e0f94...@news.saix.net>,
>haye...@hotmail.com wrote...
>> On 26 Aug 2004 07:08:35 -0700, R H Draney <dado...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>>
>> >Among those songs reaching number one on the Billboard chart in 1966:
>> >
>> >"My Love" by Petula Clark
>> >"Lightnin' Strikes" by Lou Christie
>> >"These Boots Are Made For Walking" by Nancy Sinatra
>> >"The Ballad of the Green Beret" by SSgt Barry Sadler
>> >"Soul and Inspiration" by the Righteous Brothers
>> >"When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge
>> >"Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra
>> >"Hanky Panky" by Tommy James & the Shondells
>> >"Wild Thing" by the Troggs
>> >"Cherish" by the Association
>> >"Poor Side of Town" by Johnny Rivers
>> >
>>>If you put all of those on a movie soundtrack today, you'd better set the pic
>>in
>> >the fifties, release dates be hanged....
>>
>> In late 1966 I was listening mainly to the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and the
>> Beatles (Eleanor Rigby and others on the "Revolver" album).
>
>
>Absolutamundo. Those 'hit parade' songs were popular with
>the older folks, not those of us in our teens and twenties.
Note that the list above was not a comprehensive accounting of the #1 spot for
the entire year...the position was also occupied during the year by Simon and
Garfunkel, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Young Rascals, the Mamas and
Papas, Donovan, and the unclassifiable ? and the Mysterians....
People forget that the airwaves and the record stores were a veritable
battlefield in the 1960s...the Beatles may have had a fourteen-week stranglehold
on the top chart position back in 1964 (with three different songs alternating
into the spot), but when they finally relinquished the honor it passed to
"Hello, Dolly" by Louis Armstrong....r
Skitt
> Charles Riggs posted thus:
>> By 1965 even everything had changed.
>
> I have my sister's yearbook from '65, the year she graduated from
> high school. Almost all the girls still had beehive hairdos and wore
> long skirts. The boys had short hair.
>
> Things began to change in '66.
>
> By '67, we were living in a different world.
Yeah, that's when I moved to the Seattle area and started frequenting the
Checkmate club (owned by Sonny Booker, the jazz trumpeter). It was in a
"bad" area (near Garfield High, the school of Booker and Hendrix), but I
never witnessed any problems.
My real change of lifestyle (temporary) was in 1975, with a reprise in 1977,
when I associated with some of the people from the former SFL.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/
Ben Zimmer
>
> Ben Zimmer wrote:
> > Dylan Nicholson wrote:
> >> "Ben Zimmer" wrote:
> >>> It's hard to think of any other appearances of "cool" in
> >>> the rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s.
> >>
> >> Cool Jerk, The Capitols, 1966.
> >>
> >> Contains the line "deep down inside they know I'm cool".
> >>
> >> Given I found that after about 2 minutes of searching, there's bound
> >> to many more.
> >
> > OK, but by specifying "rock lyrics of the late '60s and early '70s", I
> > was trying to limit the discussion to the usage of "cool" by the
> > vaunted counterculture -- y'know, the hippies and all that. The
> > Capitols were pop-soul (and their hit was a novelty dance tune), so
> > they don't really fit the bill.
> >
> > (I'm going by Robert Christgau's definition of "rock" here: "all music
> > deriving primarily from the energy and influence of the Beatles -- and
> > maybe Bob Dylan, and maybe you should stick pretensions in there
> > someplace." <http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/counter.php>)
>
> OK, here's rock from 1959:
>
>
> CHARLIE BROWN
> (Jerry Leiber - Mike Stoller)
> THE COASTERS (ATCO 6132, 1959)
Using the Christgau definitions, that would be "rock 'n' roll" ("the
pop-happy big beat that was disdained by nearly everyone except the kids
who listened to it between 1955 and 1964") rather than "rock".
But "Charlie Brown" is certainly part of the '50s r'n'r/R&B/doowop
lineage that extends to the '60s pop-soul of "Cool Jerk":
"Hound Dog" (1953), Big Mama Thornton ("You ain't no real cool cat")
"Cool Shake" (1957), the Del Vikings
"At the Hop" (1958), Danny & the Juniors ("The music is the coolest")
"Three Cool Cats" (1959), the Coasters
Note that "Hound Dog", "Three Cool Cats", and "Charlie Brown" were all
written by Leiber and Stoller, young white songwriters who grew up with
a love for black pop and jazz.
John Dawkins
Ben Zimmer <bgzi...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
"The cool thing was that the really hip people never heard how
bad we were... we got to practice on the busloads of tourists looking
for beatniks in the Village." (John Sebastian, recalling the early days
of the Lovin' Spoonful, from www.johnbsebastian.com)
--
J.
Evan Kirshenbaum
> R H Draney wrote:
>> 1971: _Jesus Christ Superstar_ premieres at the Mark Hellinger
>> Theatre in NYC...in the song "This Jesus Must Die", Caiaphas
>> grudgingly admits his admiration for his nemesis: "One thing I'll
>> say for him, Jesus is cool"....r
>
> I don't really know the musical, but that sounds like it could be
> the sense of "cool" meaning "assured and unabashed" (as in "cool
> customer"), rather than "cool" as a generic term of approbation
> associated with the '50s.
I've always taken the line as being something like "unflappable". I
remember it standing out the first time I heard it (probably about
1978 or so), precisely because it obviously *wasn't* the retro-50's
sense that was by then common.
> In any case, I don't think there was anything retro about that
> usage.
Another data point at the early end. The theme song from the _Iron
Man_ cartoon (1966):
Tony Stark makes you feel / He's a cool exec with a heart of steel
I'm not sure what to make of "cool cherry cream" in the Beatles' 1968
"Savoy Truffle". It may or may not be a double entendre.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |There is no such thing as bad data,
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |only data from bad homes.
Palo Alto, CA 94304
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com
(650)857-7572
don groves
bgzi...@midway.uchicago.edu wrote...
Takes me right back! I can hear those great sounds now...
There was a '50s LA DJ who played R&B until the wee hours.
Surprised I got any sleep at all.
--
dg
don groves
wrote...
Brando and Dean were icons of cool. Understated, bit of a
slouch, never in a hurry, almost as if method acting had
picked up its shtick from the late '40s, early '50s black
cats.
--
dg
Areff
> Skitt wrote:
>>
>> OK, here's rock from 1959:
>>
>>
>> CHARLIE BROWN
>> (Jerry Leiber - Mike Stoller)
>> THE COASTERS (ATCO 6132, 1959)
> [...]
>> Who walks in the classroom, cool and slow?
>
> Using the Christgau definitions, that would be "rock 'n' roll" ("the
> pop-happy big beat that was disdained by nearly everyone except the kids
> who listened to it between 1955 and 1964") rather than "rock".
When I was in 8th grade (1982) we called it "Richie Cunningham music". :-)
That sort of music definitely wasn't "rock". When I was a kid, "rock"
was, more or less, music that would be played on "rock stations". That
sort of definition became less useful beginning around or after 1982,
however.
As I've noted before, I've noticed that on those VH1 pop music history
specials and the like there's always popular music critics who are
interviewed, typically the usual sort of _Rolling Stone_ type, and they
*always* refer to "rock 'n' roll" as a sort of generic term for all
sufficiently-aesthetically-legitimate popular music (or derivatives) from
the mid-1950s on. It's silly, because no one other than these critics
uses that definition of "rock 'n' roll". You wonder where they're getting
it from, since in my experience Christgau is right: "rock 'n' roll" refers
to that 1955-1964 archaic genre set that was essentially destroyed by the
Beatles working in conjunction with Bobby Dylan, aided by the JFK
assassination.
--
Areff
> Another data point at the early end. The theme song from the _Iron
> Man_ cartoon (1966):
>
> Tony Stark makes you feel / He's a cool exec with a heart of steel
I think that's the traditional "calm and collected" sense of cool.
I mean, Erk, next thing you know you'll be arguing that Chilly Willy the
Penguin was "chilly" in the 1979 incipient hip-hop sense.
Speaking of the Beatles, does not their _The Beatles_ ("The White Album")
(1968) arguably feature the beginnings of ironic 1970s retro?
--
Ben Zimmer
>
> Speaking of the Beatles, does not their _The Beatles_ ("The White Album")
> (1968) arguably feature the beginnings of ironic 1970s retro?
In bits and pieces. "Back in the USSR" sends up early-'60s Beach Boys,
"Happiness is a Warm Gun" sends up doowop, and "Yer Blues" sends up
bombastic British blues (though that was contemporaneous, so the irony
wasn't retro). Paul had his own nostalgic fixations (Wild West tales in
"Rocky Raccoon" and the Roaring Twenties in "Honey Pie") that didn't
really presage any coming trends in retro-ness.
Al in Dallas
> You'll confuse them with facts, Richard. Their minds are made up.
>
> Now the other Richard will argue that whoever this Blackburn person was,
> he obviously didn't count. Not hip enough, or genuine enough, or he had
> the wrong hair color, or something. Data points that contradict a theory
> must be flawed, right?
Areff:
Well, I figure he's probably British, for one thing, so remember the Kojak
Thesis[TM].
But anyway, we see this problem with the lexicographers too. They don't
look for the big picture. They're not historians. A historian could
collect a whole lot of evidence and see that while, yes, a few people were
still using "cool" here and there, "cool" had definitely become moribund
by the late '60s, and "cool" had also begun to be associated with a very
different, albeit not very distant, past epoch, rather like "swell" might
have seemed in 1960.
Me:
AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
--
Al in Dallas
R H Draney
>
>Ben Zimmer <bgzi...@midway.uchicago.edu> writes:
>
>> R H Draney wrote:
>>> 1971: _Jesus Christ Superstar_ premieres at the Mark Hellinger
>>> Theatre in NYC...in the song "This Jesus Must Die", Caiaphas
>>> grudgingly admits his admiration for his nemesis: "One thing I'll
>>> say for him, Jesus is cool"....r
>>
>> I don't really know the musical, but that sounds like it could be
>> the sense of "cool" meaning "assured and unabashed" (as in "cool
>> customer"), rather than "cool" as a generic term of approbation
>> associated with the '50s.
>
>I've always taken the line as being something like "unflappable". I
>remember it standing out the first time I heard it (probably about
>1978 or so), precisely because it obviously *wasn't* the retro-50's
>sense that was by then common.
>
>> In any case, I don't think there was anything retro about that
>> usage.
I could go either way on this one...the line follows a description of how Jesus
has managed to accumulate followers without all the usual techniques: "no riots,
no armies, no fighting, no slogans"...maybe He's "cool" (=impressive) because
things fall into place around Him, or maybe He's cool (=impassive) because He
lets it happen without making a fuss about it....
There may be something retro about the usage after all...one review I stumbled
across suggests that Rice was trying to depict the Pharisees as old-fashioned
and reactionary...so maybe Caiaphas was using the word in a failed attempt to
sound hip....
>I'm not sure what to make of "cool cherry cream" in the Beatles' 1968
>"Savoy Truffle". It may or may not be a double entendre.
The whole *song* may be a double entendre...or not...George was distancing
himself from fleshly pleasures right about that time....r
Ben Zimmer
It looks like the line was cut from the recent London/New York revival
of the musical, though "Jesus is cool" still remained as a grafitto:
http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm?int_news_id=726
[Interview with Glenn Carter, who played Jesus in the revival]
Q. What is you favorite line from Jesus Christ Superstar?
A. Actually, it was cut: "Jesus is cool."
http://www.dvdlaunch.com/jesuschristsuperstar2000.html
[Review of 2000 film version of the revival production]
As the film begins, we see a wall with various slogans
painted as graffiti from "hate" to "I Love Jesus" to
"Jesus is Cool" to "liberte" to "fascism" to "freedom."
Perhaps the producers were worried "Jesus is cool" would sound dated?
(Or platitudinous, like Fonzie warning Joanie "Smokin' ain't cool"? [1])
In any case, relegating the phrase to grafitti puts it in the same
slogan-like category as "Jesus lives" (=BrE "Jesus rules OK").
[1] A precursor to "Crack is whack":
http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-270/epid-20592/
Areff
> Perhaps the producers were worried "Jesus is cool" would sound dated?
> (Or platitudinous, like Fonzie warning Joanie "Smokin' ain't cool"? [1])
Good example of the _Happy Days_ usage of "cool", for Donna.
I suppose Fonzie (= WUSSE 'Fawnzie') meant "smoking isn't admirable, isn't
worthy of approval" rather than "smoking is improper".
> [1] A precursor to "Crack is whack":
That's the Rey/Young Joey spelling, but I prefer the Keith Haring:
http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/crack_big.jpg
http://www.cnn.com/TRAVEL/NEWS/9707/03/keith.haring/crack.jpg
--
Ben Zimmer
By the late '50s, yes, much to the chagrin of the Beat pioneers.
Quoting _Birth Of The Cool_ by Lewis MacAdams (searchable on Amazon):
In "The Philosophy of the Beat Generation," an article
he wrote for _Esquire_ magazine in March 1958, Jack
Kerouac tried vainly to explain that all of this furor
[over movies like _The Blackboard Jungle_] had nothing
to do with what he'd meant by cool. Post-Korean War
teenagers had "picked up the gestures and the style" --
Elvis Presley's sideburns, Marlon Brando's white
T-shirt, James Dean's "'twisted,' slouchy look" were
the examples he used -- but they missed the passion and
yea-saying exuberance included in his own conception of
cool. His heroes were "hot," he insisted, not "cool
and beat." But nobody was listening: Kerouac was like
a man screaming into a cold wind.
It was the Presley/Brando/Dean cool that became ascendant as the Beats'
hipster cool descended into caricature (like Bob Denver's portrayal of
Maynard G. Krebs). As MacAdams describes it, there was a mainstream
backlash against hipster cool in the late '50s and early '60s, e.g.:
In 1961, Chicago's improvisational comedy troupe The
Committee put out an LP, _How to Speak Hip_, making
fun of cool. On it, John Brent tries to explain to
Del Close the difference between cool and uncool:
"It's uncool to claim you used to room with Bird, or
to claim you have his ax. Or to ask, 'Who's Bird?'"
Richard Maurer
But here is one that shows to me that it was also
a general word of approval in 1971 counter-culture.
I am dissatisfied with that statement. Later on it degenerated
into a general word of approval (maybe after Happy Days),
but there was a golden era of Approval Cool when it still had a
solid chunk of audacious associated with it. It was for a concept
or an act that was not ordinary, and probably a little risky.
The word was not used in every conversation, the word was
for fresh ideas. Perhaps that is why it did not work well
in a song that was expected to be repeated many times.
-- ---------------------------------------------
Richard Maurer To reply, remove half
Sunnyvale, California of a homonym of a synonym for also.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Riggs
wrote:
>Charles Riggs filted:
>>
>>On 26 Aug 2004 06:57:43 GMT, Areff <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
>>
>>>Ben Zimmer wrote:
>>
>>>> Also, I don't consider 1966 to be "the late '60s" quite yet.
>>>
>>>Correctamundo, because 1966 was practically still the '50s.
>>
>>Uncorrectamundo, in fact Totally, Irretrievably, and Dead Wrong. By
>>1965 even everything had changed. Right wing was out, left wing was
>>in, Doris Day type music was gone, rock `n roll had become part of our
>>souls....
>
>Among those songs reaching number one on the Billboard chart in 1966:
>
>"My Love" by Petula Clark
>"Lightnin' Strikes" by Lou Christie
>"These Boots Are Made For Walking" by Nancy Sinatra
>"The Ballad of the Green Beret" by SSgt Barry Sadler
>"Soul and Inspiration" by the Righteous Brothers
>"When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge
>"Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra
>"Hanky Panky" by Tommy James & the Shondells
>"Wild Thing" by the Troggs
>"Cherish" by the Association
>"Poor Side of Town" by Johnny Rivers
>
>If you put all of those on a movie soundtrack today, you'd better set the pic in
>the fifties, release dates be hanged....
I wouldn't have included "These Boots Are Made For Walking" (too
vindictive for the mild-mannered 50s), "When a Man Loves a Woman" (too
much soul for the bloodless 50s), "Hanky Panky", or "Wild Thing" (no
way, for those two). I'd also like to point our there a few songs of
the 60s you didn't mention.
Charles Riggs
>On 26 Aug 2004, Charles Riggs posted thus:
>
>> By 1965 even everything had changed.
>
>I have my sister's yearbook from '65, the year she graduated from
>high school. Almost all the girls still had beehive hairdos and wore
>long skirts. The boys had short hair.
These are neither intrinsic qualities nor important ones. I have very
short hair today, whoop-de-doo: I'm still a rock `n roller (or like to
think so) and smoker of the weed (when I can find it in this
authoritarian country).
>Things began to change in '66.
Life means change. Ask any Buddhist if you don't believe me.
>By '67, we were living in a different world.
A world having its roots in the earlier 60s, with only rootlets in the
50s. Don't forget the date when JFK took office.
Anyhoo, I'm older than you, dear, so, having lived through those
decades, I can tell you stories about them. Can an 8-year-old fully
appreciate how national attitudes prevalent in her first eight years
were radically changing by her eighth birthday?
Charles Riggs
wrote:
>Evan Kirshenbaum filted:
>>
>>Ben Zimmer <bgzi...@midway.uchicago.edu> writes:
>>
>>> R H Draney wrote:
>>>> 1971: _Jesus Christ Superstar_ premieres at the Mark Hellinger
>>>> Theatre in NYC...in the song "This Jesus Must Die", Caiaphas
>>>> grudgingly admits his admiration for his nemesis: "One thing I'll
>>>> say for him, Jesus is cool"....r
>>>
>>> I don't really know the musical, but that sounds like it could be
>>> the sense of "cool" meaning "assured and unabashed" (as in "cool
>>> customer"), rather than "cool" as a generic term of approbation
>>> associated with the '50s.
>>
>>I've always taken the line as being something like "unflappable". I
>>remember it standing out the first time I heard it (probably about
>>1978 or so), precisely because it obviously *wasn't* the retro-50's
>>sense that was by then common.
>>
>>> In any case, I don't think there was anything retro about that
>>> usage.
>
>I could go either way on this one...the line follows a description of how Jesus
>has managed to accumulate followers without all the usual techniques: "no riots,
>no armies, no fighting, no slogans"...maybe He's "cool" (=impressive) because
>things fall into place around Him, or maybe He's cool (=impassive) because He
>lets it happen without making a fuss about it....
I'd go for the impressive interpretation, as well as the unflappable
one. He was anything but impassive in a number of his acts. He put on
one hell of a show in that temple marketplace. Feeding all those
people with a few fish and loaves of bread was both impressive and the
act of a good showman.
I don't mean this in a derogatory way: he was an impressive figure, so
it seemed to those who met or were only near him, assuming the stories
are true, of course. There's no harm, I say, in making that
assumption.
Charles Riggs
wrote:
>Richard Maurer <rcpb1_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
...
>You'll confuse them with facts, Richard. Their minds are made up.
>
>Now the other Richard will argue that whoever this Blackburn person was,
>he obviously didn't count. Not hip enough, or genuine enough, or he had
>the wrong hair color, or something. Data points that contradict a theory
>must be flawed, right?
>Coolly -- Donna Richoux
ObAUE: Yet another sense of 'cool'.
Charles Riggs
>Chris Malcolm wrote:
>> Exactly. "Cool" was a beatnik term. See Kerouac. It wasn't cool for
>> hippies to use "cool", and when hippies became fashionable it became
>> uncool to be a beatnik.
I think that is a good way of putting it. I remember it that way, but
I hadn't, until now, thought of it quite that way.
>Correctamundo. This, by the way, was what was so historically silly about
>Fonzie being associated with "cool". Fonzie wasn't a Beatnik. He was a
>Greaser.
Since Greasers certainly weren't cool, I agree. Some girls of the time
might not have though. Greasers did have their following. I wonder if
Coop was a true Greaser. He's in the right age bracket. More
importantly, various facets of his makeup and background make me think
he might have been.
Areff
> Greasers did have their following. I wonder if
> Coop was a true Greaser. He's in the right age bracket. More
> importantly, various facets of his makeup and background make me think
> he might have been.
We should remember that there were two operative usages of "Greaser". One
was the Fonzie greaser, but the other was the very different (AFAICT) sort
of greaser that Garry Vass has spoken of, which seems closer to "nerd" in
a Potsy Weberian sense.
I suppose Coop could have been either, or neither, type of Greaser. His
fondness for motorcycles pernts to a possible Fonzie-type greaser
background. (Remember, Fonzie jumped the shark with a motorcycle.) As
for Coop's makeup, that might place him in an entirely different '50s-era
subculture (NTTAWWT).
--
Donna Richoux
> Charles Riggs wrote:
> > Greasers did have their following. I wonder if
> > Coop was a true Greaser. He's in the right age bracket. More
> > importantly, various facets of his makeup and background make me think
> > he might have been.
>
> We should remember that there were two operative usages of "Greaser". One
> was the Fonzie greaser, but the other was the very different (AFAICT) sort
> of greaser that Garry Vass has spoken of, which seems closer to "nerd" in
> a Potsy Weberian sense.
What post was that, please? I don't find it. I never heard that
"greaser" could mean "nerd" anywhere.
Merriam-Webster has two definition of "greaser" (besides the job
description of "one that greases").
2 usually offensive : a native or inhabitant of
Latin America or a Mediterranean land; especially :
MEXICAN
3 : an aggressive swaggering young white male
usually of working-class background
For "nerd" they have
an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept
person; especially : one slavishly devoted to
intellectual or academic pursuits <computer nerds>
--
Best -- Donna Richoux
Tony Cooper
wrote:
Greaser? Me? In my flattop, v-neck sweaters, flannel pants, and
dirty bucks? It is to laugh. I did use Butch Wax to try to make the
flattop look right, but even that wouldn't work for me.
Steve Hayes
>In article <412e0f94...@news.saix.net>,
>haye...@hotmail.com wrote...
>> In late 1966 I was listening mainly to the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and the
>> Beatles (Eleanor Rigby and others on the "Revolver" album).
>
>
>Absolutamundo. Those 'hit parade' songs were popular with
>the older folks, not those of us in our teens and twenties.
>
>And the best take on 'cool' has always been Joe Cool, aka
>Snoopy. More than any other characteristic, 'cool' was laid
>back, as in cool jazz vs. hot jazz.
I checked what I myself wrote in my diary at various periods. There were 30
instances, but 7 when one excluded references to the weather etc. Here they
are - I hope I've left enough context to see how the word was used.
25-Aug-1961, Friday - Johannesburg
Then we cut off to the Cul-de-Sac, where Jeremy Taylor, music
master at St Martin's School, sings. It is, as Brother Roger
says, a hole. A dark little place with tables and a friendly
informal greeting. But expensive coffee with art exhibition ads
around the walls, and plenty of "atmosphere", but without the
straining after atmosphere of the elaborate and expensive places.
Cul-de-sac has a beat atmosphere, but this is not an "effect". It
has this atmosphere because it is beat and cool. Insect agrees
that it is better than the Ambassador, which is square as hell,
and doesn't even try for "atmosphere", never mind being genuine.
It's a genuine imitation plush hotel for businessmen, and fails
miserably.
13-Jun-1963, Thursday - Pietermaritzburg
got a lift with a cool cat in a Morris Minor
29-Apr-1964, Wednesday - Johannesburg
Talked to John & Janet Fanner, told Janet her new outfit was real
cool.
1-Oct-1966, Saturday - London
From Charing Cross we went down into the Strand underground sta-
tion. Andrew had never been in one of the lifts before, and
looked over the edge, then jumped back, frightened. Peter also
had not been in one, but played it cool.
16-Jan-1970, Friday - Windhoek, Namibia
When we got back I talked to Heidi about being cool, and hang-
ups, and things like that.
20-Feb-1970, Friday - Namibia
At Okambahe itself we turned south and ran along the Erongo
mountains. We went through about fifty metres of deep sand in one
place, and had to go right down to first gear. We stopped at the
Omaruru river for a drink, and then went on next to the
mountains. The sun was setting on the right, and the moon was
rising on the left, and the whole scene was altogether
spectacular. Heidi was in ecstasies, and kept exclaiming how cool
it was.
16-Mar-1995, Thursday - Pretoria, South Africa
Bridget came to Unisa with her class to see an exhibition at the
art gallery, and I took her camera bag home. She said one of the
guys in her class said "Your dad is cool with his jeans and old
shirt".
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Charles Riggs
wrote:
>Areff <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
>
>> Charles Riggs wrote:
>> > Greasers did have their following. I wonder if
>> > Coop was a true Greaser. He's in the right age bracket. More
>> > importantly, various facets of his makeup and background make me think
>> > he might have been.
>>
>> We should remember that there were two operative usages of "Greaser". One
>> was the Fonzie greaser, but the other was the very different (AFAICT) sort
>> of greaser that Garry Vass has spoken of, which seems closer to "nerd" in
>> a Potsy Weberian sense.
>
>What post was that, please? I don't find it. I never heard that
>"greaser" could mean "nerd" anywhere.
I have to agree with Mizzz Reezshow: Greasers were not nerds. They
were respected in some circles. Not in our circle, Rickardo, but in a
sub-society that included the lower classes: a phenomenon that was
important at the time. They played their part.
Areff
> 16-Jan-1970, Friday - Windhoek, Namibia
>
> When we got back I talked to Heidi about being cool, and hang-
> ups, and things like that.
>
> 20-Feb-1970, Friday - Namibia
> [...]
> Heidi was in ecstasies, and kept exclaiming how cool
> it was.
Bear in mind the Kojak Thesis[TM], which is at least as applicable to
South Africa as it is to Europe.
> 16-Mar-1995, Thursday - Pretoria, South Africa
>
> Bridget came to Unisa with her class to see an exhibition at the
> art gallery, and I took her camera bag home. She said one of the
> guys in her class said "Your dad is cool with his jeans and old
> shirt".
Kojak Thesis[TM] still applies, but so 1995 in South Africa is basically
1985 in the US. IOW, nothing surprising here.
--
Areff
> Areff <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
>> We should remember that there were two operative usages of "Greaser". One
>> was the Fonzie greaser, but the other was the very different (AFAICT) sort
>> of greaser that Garry Vass has spoken of, which seems closer to "nerd" in
>> a Potsy Weberian sense.
>
> What post was that, please? I don't find it. I never heard that
> "greaser" could mean "nerd" anywhere.
Here's what Garry Vass has written:
FTR: I was not a jock, rather I was a 'greaser', which meant a marginal
student with coke-bottle glasses, heavy acne, extraordinarily horny, and
whose idea of a good time was to do a 'donut' in the front lawn of
another 'greaser's' house at 2AM Sunday morning (accompanied by other
'greasers' who marched to the same drum and thought it was hilariously
funny)
And on another occasion, Garry similarly wrote:
As a "greaser" (i.e., near-sighted, ingenuous, acne-plagued, socially
inept, disliterate, generally unkempt, but *voraciously* randy)
teenager, I went out with girls who carried a dime in their shoe.
I can't say I understand all that Garry is talking about here, but the
image I get of a 'greaser' is not the cool Fonzie sort of greaser.
It's not all that far off from the way this high school classmate of mine,
a fellow named Glenn, used 'greaser' to describe a subculture of male
students at my high school (whom he himself hung out with). These
'greasers' were basically the nerds or 'geeks'. They did very well in
science classes and generally only averagely in non-science classses.
They were sort of "dweeby" looking. They didn't pay much attention to
their appearance. They spent most of their time among one another, playing
cards and handball. Glenn called them 'greasers' because they tended to
have somewhat greasy hair due to a failure to regularly wash their hair,
presumably. Or so I thought until I read Garry's description, and then I
wondered whether Glenn had been using some old non-Fonzie sense of
'greaser'.
> Merriam-Webster has two definition of "greaser" (besides the job
> description of "one that greases").
>
> 2 usually offensive : a native or inhabitant of
> Latin America or a Mediterranean land; especially :
> MEXICAN
> 3 : an aggressive swaggering young white male
> usually of working-class background
Now, see, that doesn't seem all that close to Garry's definition.
>
> For "nerd" they have
>
> an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept
> person; especially : one slavishly devoted to
> intellectual or academic pursuits <computer nerds>
Okay, the intellectual stuff seems remote from Garry's greasers, but the
rest seems applicable. But Garry's greasers don't sound too different
from the 'nerds' of _Happy Days_ -- Potsy Weber and his best friend Ralph
Malph -- who were decidedly unintellectual (Potsy was actually somewhat
dimwitted, I'd say).
--
Donna Richoux
> Steve Hayes wrote:
>
> > 16-Jan-1970, Friday - Windhoek, Namibia
> >
> > When we got back I talked to Heidi about being cool, and hang-
> > ups, and things like that.
> >
> > 20-Feb-1970, Friday - Namibia
> > [...]
> > Heidi was in ecstasies, and kept exclaiming how cool
> > it was.
>
> Bear in mind the Kojak Thesis[TM], which is at least as applicable to
> South Africa as it is to Europe.
Would you stop with the lame attempts at theory-bending? If this is
supposed to be funny, I think you need to make it funnier.
Kojak didn't even START until 1973. Maybe the reason Kojak said "cool"
if he did (I assume that's the heart of your thesis) ws because Steve's
friend Heidi did, whoever she is. That's just about as likely, in my
opinion.
Fonzie, Kojak -- you really sound convinced that the primary method of
the spread of slang is US TV characters. How on earch did slang ever
arise before TV?
Me, I think the primary way slang spreads is hearing it said by friends
in the same group. Word-of-mouth. This ties it to geographic regions and
shared-interest groups.
--
Wearily -- Donna Richoux
Areff
>> South Africa as it is to Europe.
>
> Would you stop with the lame attempts at theory-bending? If this is
> supposed to be funny, I think you need to make it funnier.
>
> Kojak didn't even START until 1973. Maybe the reason Kojak said "cool"
> if he did (I assume that's the heart of your thesis)
No, not at all. I have no idea whether Kojak said "cool". I hardly ever
watched Kojak. All I know is that Kojak was a bald Greek guy who wore
three-piece suits and liked lollipops and was wont to say "Who loves ya,
baby?".
The Kojak Thesis[TM] has two parts:
(1) (Postwar) Europe is always about ten or more years behind the US wrt
popular culture
(2) E(x) = yU(x)
where, with respect to thing x, first popular in the US and later popular
in Europe, E is popularity in Europe, U is popularity in the US, and y is
the number of years between the apex of popularity in the US and the apex
of popularity in Europe.
That's why, during the mid-1980s and even perhaps today, Europeans were
into _Kojak_, not for any retro value but because to them it was the
latest show. If I were a betting man, I'd wager that J.J. Lodder is
watching a _Kojak_ episode on Netherlands television right now.
We can extend the Kojak Thesis[TM] to popular slang. Europe and South
Africa were at least ten years behind US sland in the late 1960s. Thus,
if Steve Hayes spoke of something being "real cool" back then, he was
using 1950s American slang. Of course South Africa is something of a
special case, as Steve himself has noted, because of its cultural
isolation during the apartheid era. It's possible that South Africa is
just now getting to know Fonzie.
> Fonzie, Kojak -- you really sound convinced that the primary method of
> the spread of slang is US TV characters.
No. I wouldn't be surprised if "Who loves ya baby?" is more popular in
Europe than in the US, though. But if you're asking me, was Fonzie
responsible for the revival of "cool" that we saw beginning around 1982,
I'd have to answer 'Yes!'.
> How on earch did slang ever
> arise before TV?
>
> Me, I think the primary way slang spreads is hearing it said by friends
> in the same group. Word-of-mouth. This ties it to geographic regions and
> shared-interest groups.
Don't tell me, tell all the people who keep saying that that Spicoli
character in _Fast Times at Ridgemont High_ was the central figure in the
slang history of the past 25 years.
But seriously, once television became a major medium, it was bound to have
*some* effect on the dissemination of slang.
--
R J Valentine
...
} No, not at all. I have no idea whether Kojak said "cool". I hardly ever
} watched Kojak. All I know is that Kojak was a bald Greek guy who wore
} three-piece suits and liked lollipops and was wont to say "Who loves ya,
} baby?".
Tootsie Roll Pops are the Cadillac of lollipops. Some authorities (q.v.)
hold that they are not lollipops at all (in much the same way that
corndogs are clearly not lollipops).
--
R. J. Valentine <mailto:r...@smart.net>
CyberCypher
#2 types were also known as greaseballs. #3 type is what greasers in
the '50s were like, eg John Travolta in _Grease_. They wore lots of
Brylcream in their hair, white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up,
smoked Luckies or Camels that they carried in one of their rolled-up
T-shirt sleeves, drove hot cars, carried knives, and were generally
bad boys who took shop, not physics. They didn't belong to clubs in
school but gangs out of school. The kind of greaser Garry is talking
about must be a later usage and is one that I'm not at all familiar
with.
--
Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor.
For email, replace numbers with English alphabet.
Steve Hayes
>Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> 16-Jan-1970, Friday - Windhoek, Namibia
>>
>> When we got back I talked to Heidi about being cool, and hang-
>> ups, and things like that.
>>
>> 20-Feb-1970, Friday - Namibia
>> [...]
>> Heidi was in ecstasies, and kept exclaiming how cool
>> it was.
>
>Bear in mind the Kojak Thesis[TM], which is at least as applicable to
>South Africa as it is to Europe.
Please remind me of the Kojak thesis -- I think I can remember the salient
features of the Fonzi thesis (though I'm a bit weak on the distinction between
the weak Fonzie thesis and the strong Fonzie thesis). But the Kojak thesis
eludes me for the moment.
>> 16-Mar-1995, Thursday - Pretoria, South Africa
>>
>> Bridget came to Unisa with her class to see an exhibition at the
>> art gallery, and I took her camera bag home. She said one of the
>> guys in her class said "Your dad is cool with his jeans and old
>> shirt".
>
>Kojak Thesis[TM] still applies, but so 1995 in South Africa is basically
>1985 in the US. IOW, nothing surprising here.
Again, remind me of the Kojak thesis.
Ross Howard
>Donna Richoux wrote:
>> Areff <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Bear in mind the Kojak Thesis[TM], which is at least as applicable to
>>> South Africa as it is to Europe.
>>
>> Would you stop with the lame attempts at theory-bending? If this is
>> supposed to be funny, I think you need to make it funnier.
>>
>> Kojak didn't even START until 1973. Maybe the reason Kojak said "cool"
>> if he did (I assume that's the heart of your thesis)
>
>No, not at all. I have no idea whether Kojak said "cool". I hardly ever
>watched Kojak. All I know is that Kojak was a bald Greek guy who wore
>three-piece suits and liked lollipops and was wont to say "Who loves ya,
>baby?".
>
>The Kojak Thesis[TM] has two parts:
>
>(1) (Postwar) Europe is always about ten or more years behind the US wrt
>popular culture
Ahem. Examples, please, Mr Eff. (The only ones I can think of are
counter examples -- e.g. how UK-dominated 70's heavy rock was lamely
'omaged in the '80s by Van Halen and all those other God-awful
American "hair metal" bands.)
>(2) E(x) = yU(x)
>
>where, with respect to thing x, first popular in the US and later popular
>in Europe, E is popularity in Europe, U is popularity in the US, and y is
>the number of years between the apex of popularity in the US and the apex
>of popularity in Europe.
>
>That's why, during the mid-1980s and even perhaps today, Europeans were
>into _Kojak_, not for any retro value but because to them it was the
>latest show.
Not so. Kojak's UK heyday was probably no more than one TV season
behind the US. Telly Savalas was even an unlikely hearthrob for
non-bra-burning Brit women in 1973-74. Hell, the kipper-tie-clad
buffoon even had a No. 1 sub-Lee-Marvin-croak croon toon on the
British Charts in that era ("If"). By the '80s he and the show that
made him famous were just a Starsky & Hutchy joke -- the epitome of
All-American Neo-Noir Naffness [TM] [approx. AmE: "kitsch"/"cheese"].
*Kojak* was a hit show (BrE: "progblahblah") in the UK at exactly the
same time as *The Rockford Files* and, to a lesser extent, *Cannon*
(AKA "The Detective With Heaviness Issues"). Not after. Was it rerun?
Probably. Did anyone bother to rewatch it? I don't think so.
You see, by the mid-80's every Brit's fave American detective was not
the lollipop-sucking Kojak but -- and quite right too -- the
ADA-shagging Captain Furillo.
Areff is often Dead Right about the pondiality of popular culture ,
but on the occasion when he's Dead Wrong, he tends to be so much so
it's spectacular .
--
Ross Howard
Steve Hayes
>Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> 16-Jan-1970, Friday - Windhoek, Namibia
>>
>> When we got back I talked to Heidi about being cool, and hang-
>> ups, and things like that.
>>
>> 20-Feb-1970, Friday - Namibia
>> [...]
>> Heidi was in ecstasies, and kept exclaiming how cool
>> it was.
>
>Bear in mind the Kojak Thesis[TM], which is at least as applicable to
>South Africa as it is to Europe.
OK, I've now refreshed my memory on the Kojak thesis, from your other thread,
but I don't see how it applies in this case, nor do I see how it fits in with
the Fonzie thesis, because this was pre-Fonzie, pre-Kojak and several years
pre-broadcast-TV in South Africa or Namibia..
This is describing a sunset as cool, using "cool" as a generalised term of
approval, which you said only came in after the Fonzie thing (never saw
Fonzie).
So if the Fonzie thesis holds water, it means Southern Africa must have been
ahead of the US on this one.
Ross Howard
wrought:
>an unlikely hearthrob
That's right. He stole fireplaces.
--
Ross Howard
Charles Riggs
<cyber...@19-16-25-13-01-03.com> wrote:
>Areff wrote on 28 Aug 2004:
>>
>>> Merriam-Webster has two definition of "greaser" (besides the job
>>> description of "one that greases").
>>>
>>> 2 usually offensive : a native or inhabitant of
>>> Latin America or a Mediterranean land; especially :
>>> MEXICAN
>>> 3 : an aggressive swaggering young white male
>>> usually of working-class background
>
>#2 types were also known as greaseballs.
And hardly ever, in my experience, as greasers.
> #3 type is what greasers in
>the '50s were like, eg John Travolta in _Grease_. They wore lots of
>Brylcream in their hair, white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up,
>smoked Luckies or Camels that they carried in one of their rolled-up
>T-shirt sleeves, drove hot cars, carried knives, and were generally
>bad boys who took shop, not physics. They didn't belong to clubs in
>school but gangs out of school.
Excellent description of them, Franke. I'd add that they rarely
participated in organized sports. That is why is was so incongruous
when John Revolting's character tried to. I thought he was very good
in that film, by the way. I feel in love with Stockard Channing, one
of the sexiest women I've seen on the screen.
Laura F Spira
That made me giggle. (Andirons as well? I have no idea how to pronounce
that word - I've never heard anyone say it.) It also made me wonder
about whether people read their own messages once they're posted: I
automatically mark mine read.
--
Laura
(emulate St. George for email)
Ross Howard
<la...@DRAGONspira.fsbusiness.co.uk> wrought:
Like Edward G. Robinson in *Double Indemnity*, I have a "little man"
inside me, who occasionally says"Check that post; sonny -- I think you
ballsed something up big time."
He's never wrong.
--
Ross Howard
Areff
> On 27 Aug 2004 21:01:13 GMT, Areff <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
>
>>Steve Hayes wrote:
>>
>>> 16-Jan-1970, Friday - Windhoek, Namibia
>>>
>>> When we got back I talked to Heidi about being cool, and hang-
>>> ups, and things like that.
>>>
>>> 20-Feb-1970, Friday - Namibia
>>> [...]
>>> Heidi was in ecstasies, and kept exclaiming how cool
>>> it was.
>>
>>Bear in mind the Kojak Thesis[TM], which is at least as applicable to
>>South Africa as it is to Europe.
> OK, I've now refreshed my memory on the Kojak thesis, from your other thread,
> but I don't see how it applies in this case, nor do I see how it fits in with
> the Fonzie thesis, because this was pre-Fonzie, pre-Kojak and several years
> pre-broadcast-TV in South Africa or Namibia..
It doesn't fit in with the Fonzie Thesis[TM] alone, of course, since, as
you say, this was pre-Fonzie. However, it can be understood by reference
to the Fonzie Thesis[TM] in combination with the Kojak Thesis[TM], the
latter being applicable to the entire postwar era and not just the
post-_Kojak_-pilot era.
The Fonzie Thesis[TM] tells us that (a) usage of "cool" declined in AmE
through the 1960s, so that by 1967 "cool" was effectively obsolete; (b)
_Happy Days_ presented "cool" as an archaic slang term evocative of the
distant 1950s and associated it with the iconic character of the Fonz; (c)
as a direct consequence of the popularity of the Fonz among children
during the 1974-1979 period, usage of "cool" enjoyed a remarkable revival
among teenagers beginning around 1982.
The indisputable evidence you have provided of usage of slang "cool" in
southern Africa in the late 1960s would seem to contradict the Fonzie
Thesis[TM]. However, let's remember that the Fonzie Thesis[TM] refers to
*AmE* slang developments.
The Kojak Thesis[TM] provides an explanation of the otherwise-baffling
evidence of usage of "cool" in southern Africa after 1967. Southern
Africa, like Europe, went through an embarrassing period of
America-worship during the earlier part of the Postwar Era. (This gets us
into the Post-Suez[TM] Error, but let's ignore that for now.) One
consequence of this was that American slang developments were exported to
these other places, where they caught on (= SparkE 'cot awn'). But there
was necessarily a sort of time lag. We would expect the delay
between the rise of "cool" in the US and the rise of "cool" in, say,
southern Africa to be roughly ten years.
--
CyberCypher
I liked the movie, but more for the music and the nostalgiathan the
acting. I know the name Stockard Channing, but I can't conjure up her
face or other memorable body parts.
Sara Lorimer
> On 28 Aug 2004 01:49:07 GMT, CyberCypher
> > #3 type is what greasers in
> >the '50s were like, eg John Travolta in _Grease_. They wore lots of
> >Brylcream in their hair, white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up,
> >smoked Luckies or Camels that they carried in one of their rolled-up
> >T-shirt sleeves, drove hot cars, carried knives, and were generally
> >bad boys who took shop, not physics. They didn't belong to clubs in
> >school but gangs out of school.
>
> Excellent description of them, Franke. I'd add that they rarely
> participated in organized sports. That is why is was so incongruous
> when John Revolting's character tried to. I thought he was very good
> in that film, by the way. I feel in love with Stockard Channing, one
> of the sexiest women I've seen on the screen.
It didn't seem odd to you that she was clearly in her thirties? I've
never liked that movie -- not even when I was young -- perhaps because
of the creepiness of all those adults pretending to be teenagers.
Then again, teenagers used to look older. It's not me, right? This is
true?
--
SML
Areff
>>popular culture
>
> Ahem. Examples, please, Mr Eff. (The only ones I can think of are
> counter examples -- e.g. how UK-dominated 70's heavy rock was lamely
> 'omaged in the '80s by Van Halen and all those other God-awful
> American "hair metal" bands.)
Perhaps television isn't the best source of evidence, the continuing
popularity of _The Love Boat_ in Europe and other non-US places
notwithstanding.
Look around you there in Spain. Until recently I would have pointed to
Spain as a good example of this phenomenon. Spaniards look more or less
like 1977-vintage Americans. However, it occurs to me that the recent
elections in Spain indicate that Spain may finally have made it to 1982
or so. I'm not talking ideology, obviously, but appearance. The
moustachioed Aznar is a Seventies-looking disco-dancing cocaine-snorting
type of guy; this Zapatero fellow looks more like an Eighties yuppie type.
--