“Cool” is an important concept. It’s one of the few slang words that has stood the test of time — or at least the past 60 years. You can still tell what’s important to people — culturally, ethically and even spiritually — by what they describe as “cool.”
Even though old slang words like “daddio” and “groovy” have largely faded, “cool” lives on — in a transformed, safer way. A University of Rochester Medical Centre psychologist has probed how the definition of “cool” has changed.
Psychologist Ilan Dar-Nimrod is the lead author of a paper in the Journal of Individual Differences, titled: ‘Coolness: An Empirical Investigation.’
His psychology research essay describes how the concept of being “cool” emerged after the Second World War to describe people who are rebellious, emotionally in control, tough, thrill-seeking and fiercely independent. As Frank Sinatra sang, they did things “their way.”
But that was then.
“I was not prepared to find that coolness has lost much of its historical origins and meaning,” Dar-Nimrod writes. “The main thing  is: ‘Do I like this person? Is this person nice to people, attractive, confident and successful? That’s cool today, at least among young mainstream individuals.”

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