Q From Stephanie Matthews: I’m interested in the history of the
word cool as a slang word. Apparently it was first used in the
musical West Side Story by Bernstein. Is this true? Can you
enlighten me any further? A Cool has had several meanings,
nearly all of them older than West Side Story. Its history is
more than a little complicated, because several of its senses
overlap, and it’s hard to be sure when the rather ill-defined
modern slang term came into the language. Also, it’s not always
possible to understand how it was being used in some older
examples. One slang sense is “controlled, cautious or discreet”,
which was fashionable in the early 1950s in the phrase stay
cool. This is first recorded near the end of the nineteenth
century, but it’s really a subtle transformation of a standard
English form that goes back to Beowulf, in a rather literary
metaphor for being unexcited, calm or dispassionate. This turned
up in the eighteenth century in the slangy expression cool as a
cucumber that is still with us,