Cool Your Jets

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you doing? My name’s Kurt, and I’m calling from Utah.

Okay, well, great. What can we do for you?

I grew up in the high desert of California in the mid-70s, and it was obviously pretty hot there.

And it was near Edwards Air Force Base, which is where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound, and there was the space shuttle going and all sorts of things like that.

So as a little kid, I used to love watching the airplanes.

But the, the big thing was we had a pool and when I would come home from school, I’d come running in from school and run out to the pool.

And my mom would always yell at me to cool my jets, cool your jets.

And my question for you guys is, is that, is that phrase come from being around an air force base or where did that phrase come from?

I’ve asked my mom and she doesn’t remember where she got it.

So, yeah, I was curious about that.

About what decade are we talking?

The mid-70s.

Mid-70s, okay.

It’s older than that, and I think you’re going to like this story about where it comes from.

It comes from a television show called Tom Corbett’s Space Cadet, which aired in the 1950s on a bunch of different networks.

And this show took the new space race and the new technology of jets and kind of mashed them together in these really absurd stories and histories and very odd tales of people rocketing here and rocketing there, but somehow they had jet engine on the rockets.

It really didn’t make a lot of sense.

But they had some catchphrases on the show.

But by the mid-1950s, some of these catchphrases had caught on enough where they started to be listed in articles mentioning slang.

For example, plug your jets meant to shut up.

To cut your jets means to quit doing something or to lay off of doing something.

And to blow your jets meant to get angry.

And there was a comic book.

There was a regular book.

There was a comic strip.

I think there might have been one or two little terrible movies, that sort of thing.

But by the 1960s, the form of it had become Coolier Jets.

And it shows up in high school newspapers.

You know how sometimes small town newspapers will have a section that they give over to the high school?

Like a quarter page or half page, and the students write the stories or the students write the news that’s in there.

Well, at Algona High School in Algona, Iowa in 1967, twice, they had a listing of this stuff.

And one of the entries was cool your jets, meaning to relax or to take it easy.

And so from then on, we really start to see this term pop up repeatedly in the 60s and the 70s, until it becomes so entrenched under culture that we kind of lost the source of it.

But we can, using all these old archives of periodicals, kind of trace it back and see the vague outline of the path back to this one television show, Tom Corbett Space Cadet.

Oh, wow. So it doesn’t have too much to do with the Air Force bases?

No, I’m quite sure that as the history and the kind of the passion that people had for jet technology and the hero worship, and, of course, when the space program brought in all these flyers to be the first astronauts, I mean, the whole thing is just awash in mythology and hagiography and just wonderful tales and a lot of respect for these crazy flyers.

I am quite sure that even though it didn’t come from the Air Force bases, that it definitely had to feed into the longevity of this term.

Gotcha.

Yeah, does that make sense to you?

Well, yeah.

I’m going to have to tell my kids that I didn’t come up with it, which is what I’ve been telling them for the last 10 years.

Oh, no.

But now you have the origin story, and that’s an interesting thing in itself, right?

Absolutely.

Can I leave you with one more interesting fact?

Sure.

So this television show, Tom Corbett’s Space Cadet, based itself off of a Robert Heinlein novel called Space Cadet, which was published, I believe, in 1948.

That’s the first use we know of the term Space Cadet was in that Heinlein novel.

But that novel, but especially the TV show and the comic book of Tom Corbett, this gave us the modern slang term space cadet, meaning somebody with their head in the clouds or somebody who is a space case or very spacey, not really thinking about the earthly affairs or what’s happening here with our feet on the ground.

So this television show also gave us space.

It’s out of fashion.

I guess in the 80s it was more common, but it gave us that slang term as well.

And I’ve never heard of the TV show, but it sure has given us a lot, huh?

Yeah, well, think back to when television was the situation where you didn’t have 500 channels.

You were lucky to have three and to receive them all clearly.

So a lot of Americans watched the same few shows.

And so it was very easy for one show, even if it was terrible, to have a lot of impact.

Gotcha.

Well, thank you for clearing that up for us.

That was our pleasure.

Call us again sometime, all right?

Thanks for calling, Kurt.

All right, thank you.

Take care.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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