5-star Fedora experience

[Andrew Haley]

On 06/20/2011 06:35 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-06-20 at 13:20 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
>> On Sunday, June 19, 2011 10:58:28 AM Fernando Cassia wrote: > 73 year
>> olds say "how cool"? I thought ´cool´ was a 1980s thing (sorry, >
>> English is not my native language :)
>>
>> In a local restaurant, there is an old advertisement poster for men's
>> boxer shorts, and in quotes the word 'coolness.'  My oldest teenage
>> daughter saw that and wondered about the 'modern' advertisement. 
>> Fortunately, there was a copyright date on the poster.  The date?
>>
>> 1915.
>>
>> What's old is new again.
>>
>> It's quite possible that a little over twenty years after that ad was
>> published the shorter 'cool' was still in use, around the time a 73
>> year-old would have been born.
> 
> It's also possible that the advertisement literally meant "keeps your
> genitals cool in the summer". It's hard to know what a hundred-year-old
> advertisement might really have meant :)

Perhaps.  At times like this I look to the OED, and its first citation
is from the New Yorker in 1948: "The bebop people have a language of
their own. Their expressions of approval include 'cool'!"

Andrew.