on being cool

Re: When does the bravado become uncool? Why does anything have to be cool? Somehow the idea of hipness has become the essential thing. I don't know exactly when this happened. Anybody know? I haven't always been paying attention. But now one hears this word, presumed to mean something to adolescents, used by grey haired types who ought to have formed more discriminating means of commentary.While I do not remember what my parents or other adults babbled to me in my infancy, I notice that parents (and teachers) seem universally to use (in this country anyway) the epithet "cool" as their unique form of praise, and the pattern begins before the kid can talk. One might reasonably wonder why little "Johnny" needs to be indoctrinated into the identification of the "cool" from his (or her) earliest moments of awareness. Why??For some adults, a rich English vocabulary of evocative words is reduced to nearly this one syllable by which one "emotes" (?) one's only permissible comment, one which must be applied to nearly any situation: "cool."It annoys me to no end, and I say this as a lifelong fan of Miles Davis. Well, there has to be a reason why we use this term as routinely as Osama bin Laden says "Allāhu Akbar." Evidently it is our religion. Well, somebody's, not mine. Do not indoctrinate your children into the idea that they must be "cool." Rather encourage them to be as "uncool" as they please. Urge them to cultivate "uncoolness" by being all the myriad things that people used to be prior to the invention of "cool."Better still, when they are on the threshold of adulthood, encourage them to take the next step. Encourage them to grow up.