Close your eyes and think back to some terms that you heard at a party in the Y2K era. If someone in 2026 genuinely asked, “Do you want to get crunk with that guy wearing bling or is he a scrub?” they’d seem like they were living in the past, right? It goes down just as well as greeting someone with a “Wassup!” from the 1999 Budweiser commercials, or referring to someone’s hat as “fly.” Slang terms seem to have a shelf life of a couple of years before they fizzle out, and are a clear line of demarcation between who’s young and cool and who’s not. The interesting thing is that the term “cool” has never really gone out of style. It was used to describe James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 and in 2025 to describe singer Charli xcx. According to sociolinguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky, Ph.D the term “cool” has been used to describe someone who’s incredibly calm for over 500 years. But it really took off in the jazz era, when Black musicians used it to inspire a style and sound.  The birth of ‘cool’  “From Anna Lee Chisholm’s ‘Cool Kind Daddy Blues,’ to Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool, the word was used to describe a certain kind of musicality, but also a type of personality, laid back, competent, and confident,” Brozovsky said. “By the late forties, The New Yorker noted the term’s rising popularity. ‘The bebop people have a language of their own, their expressions of approval include, cool,’” Brozovsky said. Miles Davis. Credit: Winston Vargas/Flickr The term has endured for decades, from the definition of cool, Arthur Fonzarelli in the ‘70s, to actor-comedian Eddie Murphy in the ‘80s, to Snoop Dogg in the ‘90s, and Bad Bunny in the modern era. The question remains why “cool ” has stood the test of time while terms such as “swell” or “wicked” have fallen into the cultural dustbin. Brozovsky believes it has to do with a linguistic quirk in which humans tend to repeat metaphors with sensory elements more often than those without. It makes sense. “Cool” is something you can feel while “swell” is not. Why is it that ‘cool’ has stuck around? “A 2015 study tracked the popularity of various words and phrases over time and found that terms that evoke a sensory experience are more likely to persevere than those that don’t. For instance, sharp increase became a more popular way to say sudden increase and a bright future became more common than a promising future,” Brozovsky says. Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley. Credit: Marion Doss/Flickr “In fact, the study found that people were 50% more likely to remember a list of metaphors if they contain sensory words,” she continues. “Perhaps swell with its convoluted origin was just too abstract to compete with the physical sensation of cool, but it seems to me that the history of the word outweighs its semantic appeal.” In a world where styles in clothing, music, and vocabulary are constantly changing, it’s nice to know that some things cut across the generations. Whether you’re 70 or you’re 12, you know what it means to be cool. You probably don’t agree on who fits the bill, but vibe is forever. The post Expert reveals the linguistic quirk that explains why every generation loves the word ‘cool’ appeared first on Upworthy.