Which detail best develops the author’s idea that cool has expanded beyond its original meaning? 1. Cool is still cool. The word, the emotional style, and that whole flavor of cultural cachet¹ remains strong after more than half a century. It is, according to linguistic anthropologist² Robert L. Moore, the most popular slang term of approval in English. Moore says cool is a counterword, which is a term whose meaning has broadened far beyond its original denotation.

2. For a millennium or so, cool has meant low in temperature, and temperature itself has long been a metaphor for psychological and emotional states (a cool reception, hotheaded). Chaucer, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, used cool to describe someone’s wit, Shakespeare to say, “More than cool reason ever comprehends.”

3. But starting around the 1930s, cool began appearing in American English as an extremely casual expression to mean something like “intensely good.: This usage also distinguished the speaker, marking them as from mainstream culture.

4. As its popularity grew, cool’s range of possible meanings exploded. It is almost impossible to try to determine all the qualities collecting in the hidden folds of cool. These meanings include self-possessed, disengaged, quietly disdainful, morally good, intellectually assured, aesthetically rewarding, physically attractive, fashionable, and on and on.

5. Cool as a multipurpose slang word grew prevalent in the fifties and sixties, eventually outshining countless other informal expressions such as groovy, smooth, awesome, phat, sweet, just to name a few. Along the way, however, it has become much more than a word to be broken down and defined. It is practically a way of life.