Q: I was reading an op-ed that had this quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address: “That is cool.” At first I thought it was satire, but he did indeed say this. What did he mean by “cool”?
A: Lincoln used “cool” in his 1860 Cooper Union speech to mean impudent or shameless, senses that appeared in two of the leading American dictionaries of the time, though the primary meaning was, as it is now, “moderately cold” or “not warm.”
The entry for the adjective “cool” in An American Dictionary of the English Language (1860), by Noah Webster, revised and enlarged by Chauncey A. Goodrich, includes this sense: “Impudent in a high degree, as when speaking of some trick, pretension, &c., we say, ‘that is cool.’ ”
And the entry for the adjective in A Dictionary of the English Language (1860), by Joseph Emerson Worcester, includes this sense: “Shameless; impudent. [Colloquial.]” It cites this example from Punch: “That struck me as rather cool.”
The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, says the “impudent” sense of “cool” first appeared in the early 18th century and described “a person, an action, or a person’s behaviour: assured and unabashed where diffidence and hesitation would be expected; composedly and deliberately audacious or impudent in making a proposal, demand, or assumption.”
The earliest OED citation for this sense is from the English writer Aaron Hill’s tragedy King Henry V (1723), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s 1599 play that adds a romance between the king’s mistress and the French dauphin. The mistress complains of the king’s “cool Insolence of Pride, and Majesty.”
In Lincoln’s Feb. 27, 1860, speech at what was then the Cooper Institute, he compares the threat of Southern Democrats to secede from the Union if a Republican were elected president to an armed robbery:
“In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ ”
As for the informal sense of “cool” that came to mind when you first noticed the term in Lincoln’s speech, the OED describes it as “originally in African American usage: (as a general term of approval) admirable, excellent.”
The dictionary’s earliest citation is from “The Gilded Six-Bits,” a short story by Zora Neale Hurston: “And whut make it so cool, he got money ’cumulated. And womens give it all to ’im” (Story magazine, August 1933).
[Note: We published a post in 2010, “Birth of the cool,” about “cool” and other words that originated in Black English. We also posted about the very old noun “coolth” in 2013.]
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