Complex Numbers

Cool Fusion

PROMPT May 11th

What was cool when you were young but isn’t cool now? Is there anything that has become cool in recent years that wasn’t cool in your youth?

What was cool when you were young but isn’t cool now?

Mammoth hunts.

Come on, you knew I was going to make that joke.

I gotta say, though, I don't know what's cool and I never did. The entire idea of fashion and popularity eludes me. I suppose the word "cool" itself might qualify. I'm pretty sure that this meaning of the word came about as part of whatever counterculture was prominent at the time, and it's been switching from cool to cold and back again ever since.

One of the idiosyncrasies of English is how some words can mean their exact opposite also, as with "cleave." Such contronyms must be nothing but confusing for those poor sods who have to learn our language. Another is that words for opposite concepts can come to mean similar things, as with "cool" and "hot." And meanings can change over time; I'm told that the original meaning of "nice" was closer to how we use the word in sarcasm today.

I do remember that one thing we did a lot of back when "groovy" was a thing was for kids to ride in the back of pickup trucks, or in cars without seatbelts. Do that now, and you get your kids taken away.

Honestly, I'm not sure how any of us managed to survive.

Some changes have been for the worse, sure, but I don't ever want to be one of those old guys who bemoans the loss of some bullshit "good old days." We have a lot more respect for nerds today than there once was, for instance. Learning science and math has become cool. There's tobacco, which has gone from cool to not-cool, and cannabis, which has gone from not-cool to cool. At least in mainstream culture; in La Résistance, it's always been cool.

The only certainty in life is change, and it's best to try to stay cool about it. And yet some things endure; sunglasses, for example, have always been, are, and always will be, the Platonic ideal of cool.