For example: “’You can say what you like,’ returned the sergeant, standing coolly looking at him [Magwitch, the convict] with his arms folded, ‘but you have no call to say it here.’”

When Jaggers is humiliating/tormenting Molly (Estella’s mother): “’There’s power here,’ said Mr. Jaggers, coolly tracing out the sinews with his forefinger.”

And: “I was beginning to express my gratitude to my benefactor for the great liberality with which I was treated, when Mr. Jaggers stopped me. ‘I am not paid, Pip,’ said he, coolly, ‘to carry your words to any one’…”

Pip never calls Estella’s behvaior “cool,” though. “Cold,” but not cool. “Estella was always about, and always let me in and out, but never told me I might kiss her again. Sometimes, she would coldly tolerate me; sometimes, she would condescend to me; sometimes, she would be quite familiar with me; sometimes, she would tell me energetically that she hated me.” The over-rational Jaggers is cool; the irrational Estella cold.

And then there’s money. When Jaggers first gives him some of his inheritance, Pip recounts: Jaggers “produced a long purse, with the greatest coolness, and counted them [twenty guineas] out on the table and pushed them over to me.” And when Pip tries (unsuccessfully) to become more like Jaggers, he recounts: “I established with myself, on these occasions, the reputation of a first-rate man of business,—prompt, decisive, energetic, clear, cool-headed.” Of course, he is anything but cool-headed; like Joe, whose place in Pip’s emotional life Jaggers is unable to usurp, Pip is warm.

So when Joe calls a sum of money a “cool four thousand,” Pip is only affecting not to understand how a sum can be cool. Joe is mistakenly equating coolness with sophistication and worldly wisdom—just as he (Pip) formerly had a manifest relish in insisting that his business-head was a cool one.

Not convinced you’re gonna get to the root of cool by obscurantizing it as much as possible. Just sayin’, it ain’t the most direct route to figuring out what’s cool and what’s not. Usage and root meanings aren’t that far below the surface, one, but the method of analysis-as-entomologist—- that is, treating a word as a bug and then dipping it formaldehyde and then pinning it, dead, to a board and sliding it into a drawer rather than seeing what has done—recently, in context, in the fabric of life, as a living word—just isn’t gonna help you any. Halfway there, sure, but not exactly on the shortest or surest track to what is, I guess, the goal here.

You do realize, I hope, that because of this question, all comments on this thread must be regarded as pity comments.

I’m fairly sure that coolness is radically disunified. 2o years ago a schoolfriend observed to me that the kind of coolness exemplified by Judge Dredd in 2000AD was incompatible with the kind of coolness exemplified by his Latin teacher. (Having met the Latin teacher, I agreed.) The firneds suggestion was that ‘cool’ should be treated as a vector quantity, with both magnitude and direction, rather than as a scalar.

That West African influence in Beowulf will come as a surprise to scholars of Old English, I’m sure.

“Now why did my previous post garner scarcely a comment?”

Ok, Ok, here’s a pity comment :)

Because it said “Plato,” right there in the title.

kricfalusi’s position is largely about inter-hipster cultural positioning and niche micro-differentiation, i think…

otoh: happy happy joy joy! log log log!

you should all rush out and read the chernoff anyway