Wordcatcher (16 page)

In the know,
hip
to the connotations.
According to the
Hipster Dictionary
,
cool
is “A-OK, hep, unworried,
calm
, relaxed,” as in “real gone daddy, dig dong daddy, hepcat.” A very
cool
definition. Still, it’s a living paradox of a word. The moment anything is labeled
cool
it’s immediately something else, which is the sleeves-rolled-up job of street
slang
, jargon, argot, and
cant
. It’s
cant
that can do, a quality that an ordinary dictionary can’t
cant
. A
cool
caveat has been registered by jazz historian Ted Gioia in
The Birth (and Death) of the Cool
, where he writes that the term has become “a verbal tic expressing approval of any sort … applicable to anything that is current or popular or even just acceptable.”
Cool
is possibly from the Yoruba, where it was once defined thus: “
Coolness
is correct way to present yourselves to human beings.” Calvin confides to Hobbes in the Sunday funnies, “What fun is it being
cool
if you can’t wear a sombrero? ” Biographer Frank Buchmann-Miller writes, “Lester Young remains one of the great
jazz
icons—the first
paragon of cool
and an inspiration to countless musicians, from Charlie Parker to Stan Getz.” Thus, asking what
cool
is is like asking Louis Armstrong what jazz is: “If you have to ask, there just ain’t no telling ya.” You know it when you see it; you’re it without even trying. To
dig the essence of
cool
, you have to know the depths of
dig
, which means “to get it, be in on it, comprehend, approve,” and which Cassidy claims for Irish
tuig
, to understand. The paragon of
cool
, jazz man Sidney Bechet, called his music “the remembering song. There is so much to remember.” Now that’s
cool
without ever uttering the word, a hip revelation of
character
.

An inexhaustible source
. We say that a great bookstore is a
cornucopia
of reading pleasure, a farmer’s market is a
cornucopia
of food, or, as my son reminds me, an Apple store is a
cornucopia
of computers. When we use the word we are echoing an old story that comes down to us in the Latin
capricornus
, from
cornu copiæ
, literally a “horn of plenty.” There is myth aplenty stored up in the word. According to the old taletellers, Zeus placed his wet nurse, Amaltheia, the “horned goat,” in the sky in thanks for acting as his nursemaid when he was an infant. So grateful was he that he took one of her horns and transformed it into the “horn of plenty,” one that would replenish itself forever with food at the mere whim of the owner. In literature, the word is often used metaphorically, as when William Styron answered George Plimpton’s question, in
The Paris Review
, about competition in the world of writers. “I’m enormously pleased when one of my contemporaries comes out with a good book because it means, among other things,
that the written word is gaining force. It’s good for us to be throwing these fine novels into the cultural
cornucopia
.” In art and architecture a
cornucopia
is usually depicted as a curved goat’s horn overflowing with flowers, fruit, and grain, signifying abundance. So a dictionary is a
cornucopia
of words; a
cornucopia
is a dictionary of myth. Companion words include
capricornified
, defined by the inimitable Captain Grosse, in his
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
, as “cuckolded, hornified.”

A good time, where the action is, the real thing.
Old Irish, used in the most common expression from Galway to Dublin: “Where’s the
craic
?” [pronounced “crack”]. It is asked in pubs, streets, schools, after mass, and before leave-taking, meaning, “Where’s the fun, the good time, the best people, the night life, the
craic
?” To go in search of the
craic
could refer to the best pint of Guinness, the best
seisun
(a spontaneous music session), the prettiest colleens, or the hunkiest lads. In Ireland,
craic
is to social life as Joyce’s
Ulysses
is to literature, U2 to music, and Tullymore Dew to whiskey. Its discovery is the result of an all-day, all-night search, not unlike Leopold Bloom’s twenty-four-hour odyssey in search of love around Dublin. James A. C. Stevenson explains, in his
Dictionary of Scots Words & Phrases
, that the Scottish word
crack
as a sharp noise, as chat or
conversation
, and offers up the old Scottish expression, “Gie’s your
crack” (“Tell me your news.”) In “Yesterday’s Men,” the Irish rock band Celtic Thunder sings: “Farewell to the paydays, the pints and the
craic
/ Oh, We gave them our best years now they’ve paid us back.”

Cracked, off-kilter, cockamamie, insane.
Originally a verb,
craze
, which meant to “break, crush, or shatter,” from Old French
acraser
and the Old Norse
krasa
, “to crackle.” The Swedish phrase “Sla I kras” renders a dynamic picture of its original meaning, to be “dashed or broken to pieces.” Figuratively, it came to refer to how the mind and spirit can be dashed or broken, and eventually led to the current sense of a psychological “crack-up,” worthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In street slang,
crazy
means “good, superlative, wild, the best, real gone.” Companion words include
craze
, a mania or fad;
crazy quilt
, an eccentric pattern, and
crazy
, the Roaring Twenties slang for “
cool, hip
, with it.” Colloquial phrases include “
Crazy
as two left shoes,” “
crazy
like a fox,” and Willie Nelson’s “Crazy,” his first hit song: “I’m crazy for crying, crazy for trying, and I’m crazy for loving you.” A vibrant companion word is
derange
, from French
déranger
, and Old French
desrengier
, disarrange, from the Indo-European prefix
des
-, to do the opposite of. Thus, Baudelaire was right when he suggested that a poet had to be a little crazy and intentionally
derange the senses
, as in rearrange them to reflect the shattered reality of life.
Crazy
as it sounds, the Swedish actor Peter Stormare tries to explain the secret meaning behind the cult movie
The Big Lebowski
, where he appears as one of the demented enforcers, like this: “The
craziness
of being a human being, and ending up in such a mess.”

To sail, cross, ease by, search for love trouble.
The word didn’t begin with luxurious associations of bourgeois people cruising the Seven Seas.
Cruise
began as a term for pirate attacks. Around 1651 it arrived in the port of English usage from the Dutch
kruisen
, to sail to and fro, and
kruis
, cross, from Latin
crux
. Thus, to
cruise
is to cross a body of water, preferably exotic; figuratively, a
cruise
was closer to a
crisscross
, a medieval sailing pattern, up and down, back and forth, used by ships to avoid being captured by those dreaded pirates. Companion words include the
naval cruiser
from 1679, and 250 years later, in 1929, the
police cruiser
. Later, the rapscallion association was co-opted, like so much bohemian behavior, by the well-to-do who went sailing on their own leisurely
schedules
rather than officially ordained schedules, thereby operating outside protocol, outside usual time. To say they were
cruising
to be amusing wouldn’t be sailing off course.

A rarified expression for “darling” or “sweetheart.”
A
lullaby
of a word, a sweet nothing with a brogue. The crusty Clint Eastwood played a boxing trainer who reads an Irish-English dictionary between training sessions in the movie
Million Dollar Baby
. While riffling those pages he discovered this honey of a word, which literally means “vein in my heart,” deriving from
Cushla
, from O cuisle, meaning “the vein or pulse of my heart.” Companion words include
sweetening, sweetie,
and
sweeting
, Old English for “sweetheart, lover,” used by Shakespeare in
Othello
: “All’s well
sweeting
, / Come away to bed.” A sweetheart in Yorkshire, in less-than-sweet contrast, is the rough-and-tumble
wonder-wench
. A ladylove in Italy is the more dulcet-sounding
inamorata
.