Why Money is Sometimes “Cool”

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matthew from Arlington, Texas.

Yeah, excellent. Well, what can we do for you, Matthew?

Well, I had a question about the word cool.

So, as an older millennial, I’ve been describing things as cool, basically since I could talk.

But there’s another sense of the word that I was curious about, which is describing a sum of money.

You know someone makes a deal and they they got a they got a cool million off of it. Now I’d never really thought about it. I’m not sure that I’ve ever, you know, heard anybody use that in real life.

But I came across it in a kind of surprising place. So then catching up on some classics, and in Great Expectations, the Charles Dickens novel, at one point the stepdad figure comes into some money.

And he describes it as a cool 4,000 pounds.

And I thought that was interesting.

Because Great Expectations was written in the 1860s.

So I was curious, do those two uses of the word cool have anything to do with each other?

And did one of them come first?

Yeah, so they are related, but cool is complicated, just like hot is complicated.

Because these two very basic adjectives have been used in figurative ways so much in English that, of course, they’re related, because they all go back to, we compare so many things to heat and coolness.

All languages, as far as I know, that I’ve ever studied use them metaphorically or figuratively.

And so, yeah, they’re related.

But I don’t really want to get into all the meanings of cool because there’s so many.

We could be here for weeks talking about it.

But I will say that there’s one really interesting thing when we talk about cool and with relationship to money, we talk about a cool 4,000 pounds or a cool million.

And that is it emphasizes that it’s significant and it’s also explaining that we’re not exaggerating.

So often when we talk about a money, we exaggerate.

We’ll say he won like a million dollars.

And that word like in there indicates that we’re probably rounding up.

But if we say he won a cool million dollars, we’re indicating that he not only won a million dollars, it’s probably more than a million dollars.

And so it’s saying he definitely won a million dollars and we’re understating it.

And that means it sounds even better than if we were exaggerating.

Right, that he walked away with it.

He walked away with it.

Exactly.

So it’s a weird, interesting way of emphasizing because ordinarily we use hot to emphasize.

But in this case, we’re using cool to emphasize.

Well, that is really cool.

Thank you so much.

Yeah.

Hey, take care of yourself and call us again sometime.

All right.

Really appreciate your time.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

Well, we know that you have been reading a book and you stumbled across a word just like Matthew did.

In, you’re thinking, I never thought about the way that word was used.

We’d love to talk with you about it. 877-929-9673.