Web search the word “cool,” and you will find definitions for an adjective, a noun, and a verb that will not satisfy you if you are looking for which personal qualities identify someone as popular in some segment of society. You might find a slang definition that will simply say that a cool person is great, awesome, or a trend setter, but those are comments, and they don’t leave you with any understanding of why someone seems to be cool among his or her peers.
Try the “Urban Dictionary” definition of cool. Since it is crowd-sourced, you may find current group-think best to inform you on what cool means today. It works like this: Someone defines what cool means. Then, everyone else votes thumbs up or down. There is no theoretical end to the number of definitions. The definition which earns the most thumbs up is awarded the top spot. That definition may not stay in the top spot for long.
At 5:52 PM, Eastern Daylight Time, on June 06, 2019, the top definition for someone who is cool is someone who is an individualist, also known as “real,” The cool person does what he or she wants to do and does not care how others feel about that. The expansion of the definition is that hanging out with cool people means that you might experience surprise or even shock at what one or more cool people do because they do what they want to do, with no concern for others.
The second place Urban Dictionary definition that I read two minutes later does not get into the issue of who is cool, but rather it states that cool means relaxed, never going out of style, and generally means that whatever is cool is OK. I skipped down to find the fourth most popular definition, which was that cool is what you say when you have no idea what else to say. The expanded definition was in the form of an example. One person stated, “I saw a cute kitten today.” The other person said, “Cool.”
I think I have cool straight now, using these three definitions. My example is, “While dining at an upscale outdoor restaurant in Jamaica, I saw a guest stand up, strip down to his under-shorts, and go swimming in the adjacent lily pad pond. He performed the backstroke, which is the most relaxing way to swim. Cool, cool, cool.”
Better: Cool is the actor Paul Newman. He was “Sunglasses Cool,” so cool that he wore sunglasses to spare women from the shock of how blue-eyed cool he was.
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