THE KICKER:At one party a pretentious young man of about 15 spied a family piano in the corner, and upon finding out it had been left in a state of disrepair, responded, writes John Butler
I'M STARTING to wonder whether, as a person inching inexorably north through his 30s, the word "cool" is an age-appropriate option. As far as I'm concerned, things are still "cool" - even the conclusion of my phone call with the broadband people in which they have told me that they can't fix the problem for five to 10 working days. You'll get back to me by next Friday week? Okay, cool.
Cool is my "wicked", my "awesome", my "pukka", my "ace". The word is fantastic, stunning, magical and classic. But it's more than that, too.
I say it when I'm not sure whether I'm happy, and when I'm definitely unhappy. When I don't want to say anything it appears, unprovoked, like a tic. Just like a surfer with the word "dude", I use it quite without meaning, as a form of punctuation. When I want to use a better word instead, "cool" seems to pop out unbidden, 100 times a day. That's cool, I suppose. But hang on. Dammit. It's not.
When I use it in conversation with someone who is over 60, they find my infantile wordplay funny. "It's cool, is it? It's really . . . cool?" they reply, wrapping the word around air quotes, eyebrows raised at the absurdity of this teddy-boy talk. Only then is the word drawn into focus and given the proper context. Then, I feel like Henry Winkler as The Fonz on Happy Days, giving the thumbs-up sign and chewing gum, inanely. That is "cool", or rather that is not cool, but that is cool as far as they are concerned (I must stress, Henry Winkler giving the thumbs-up is not the image I was trying to evoke, not at all).
I wonder whether using "cool" has ever been right for me, other than to describe the temperature inside a fridge, the weather on the beach or a long-since-abandoned cup of tea. Where did I pick it up in the first place? Although the genesis is clearly American, they tend to use it far less than I do, as far as I can tell. Upon encountering them, they tend to find great things "awesome", "excellent" or "radical" far more than they ever find them "cool" - at least on the left coast. In the more patrician areas of eastern US, they tend to find things "terrific" instead, and the word "cool" is - to them - as quaint and 1950s-sounding as "swell".
We Irish have no shortage of alternatives for "cool". Obviously, we love "deadly", and "magic", while in the 1980s something that was amazingly good was also "vicious" or "gear", or in exceptional circumstances "totally gear". For a while, "rapid" gained some currency too, but I think it was finally done in by the soft "d" that an Irish accent can't help lending it. Things weren't rapid, they were only "rap-eh", and the soft consonant ending of "rap-eh" felt anti-climactic. Also, it tended to be paired with "bleedin'", a frankly useless word that people always use in poor impersonations of the "real" Dublin accent.
When I was young, though, "cool" was perfectly appropriate, because back then we were "cool", both in the slightly tragic, trying-too-hard Henry Winkler sense of the word, and because froideur of any kind was highly desirable. In the city centre bar where I worked as a lounge boy, instead of simply ordering a drink a south Dublin kid once said "Can you score me a Pepsi?", as if it were a dime bag of Afghan heroin. The kids were so cool that cool was not enough.
They liked to spin their own argot of tragically complicated inversions and triple negatives with which they could suggest in their own way that they thought something was particularly great. Something which was cool became "so not-un-cool". This was the kind of suburb where 13-year-old kids listened to Charlie Parker, and these were the same kids who upon hearing or seeing something funny - usually at someone's expense - would casually point and as languidly as possible exclaim "waaaaaa!!", in lieu of an actual laugh. Laughter's not cool.
These kids were also fond of the word "basically", which they dragged out to impossible thin-ness so that the word became "baaaaaasically", a Stretch Armstrong of vowels. Such sophistication was common (or was "so not uncommon") in Dublin house parties of the late 1980s, when one's parents were at the golf club. At one party a particularly pretentious young man of about 15 spied a family piano in the corner, and upon finding out it had been left in a state of disrepair, responded, "That's cool. I love playing Edith Piaf on out-of-tune pianos". That was most certainly cool, but not in the sense that he meant it. Ianother room, three kids were co-writing a novel which they were presumably planning on finishing before the host's parents got back from the golf club. I'm not sure whether the manuscript survives but I would dearly love to read it.
At another party I recall one kid reprimanding a crasher for pilfering booze from the drinks cabinet - "I don't know who you are or what your game is. But whatever you're doing, it's seriously uncool." This much I know - if the crasher were from south Dublin suburbs, such a talking to would have stopped him dead in his tracks.
I'm going to stop using the word "cool" here and now. Such is the abundance of it all around them that the Inuits are said to have a hundred words for "snow". It's a positive sign that there are so many words in our language to define something that is good or pleasing in some way - in fact, it's just swell.