The thing about the word "cool," for me, is that it means so many things to so many people and in so many contexts that it's... well, not meaningless, but it has a really wide spectrum of meanings. They're all generally positive, unless it's being used sarcastically, but trying to pin it down beyond "generally positive, not a strong superlative" is hard. And it doesn't even always mean positive -- sometimes it explicitly means neutral and calm, instead! "That's cool," depending on delivery and person and context, could be anything from lukewarm to gushingly enthusiastic.
(It's a thing I've become more aware of since I started doing translation, because it's a job where one starts to notice all the words that could be translated by a zillion other words depending on context. "Cool," "good," "nice," "awesome," they're all things that have a lot of associations and shades of potential meaning, and that vagueness is sometimes handy and sometimes just, well, vague.)
So I disagree that cool people are not enthusiastic, because I think that again it depends on the context. Yes, if you're using it in the way you are here, to mean "cool, as opposed to enthusiastic or warm or geeky," then it entails that. The whole "cool dude" stereotype thing. But I would use "cool" to mean instead "self-assured, confident, secure in themself (and probably more charismatic because of it)," and that can absolutely mean "confident enough to be cheerfully visibly enthusiastic instead of fretting about self-image." So a lot of the people I would describe as cool do indeed get nerdily excited about things! Caterpillars are cool; language is cool; that person is cool, and they were just telling me about how caterpillars are great.
Though I admit that also, as a geek who does default to fairly reserved, I also have a kneejerk reaction in the opposite direction to geeky circles' admonitions to be excited and shout about things instead of being cool/reserved/etc. Like, being fairly quiet and reserved is how I am! I get excited about things quietly and reservedly, and express it very contextually! This is not me arguing that you're wrong in your associations with the various terms at all, for the record, so if it comes across as that I apologize; I'm just thinking aloud and poking at my own differing associations.
(I don't know if I come across as reserved in SCD circles, but the dance floor is also where I automatically go into my most extroverted mode, because of a lifetime training of The Role One Plays In This Situation. That was always true, even when I was a shy awkward teenager, and then became doubly true once I became a teacher and on committees and stuff, and thus my brain was like "oh, now I'm explicitly in an ambassadorial role too!" If I don't have enough social batteries for super social mode, I don't have enough social batteries to go to dance, because the two go together for me.)
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(It's a thing I've become more aware of since I started doing translation, because it's a job where one starts to notice all the words that could be translated by a zillion other words depending on context. "Cool," "good," "nice," "awesome," they're all things that have a lot of associations and shades of potential meaning, and that vagueness is sometimes handy and sometimes just, well, vague.)
So I disagree that cool people are not enthusiastic, because I think that again it depends on the context. Yes, if you're using it in the way you are here, to mean "cool, as opposed to enthusiastic or warm or geeky," then it entails that. The whole "cool dude" stereotype thing. But I would use "cool" to mean instead "self-assured, confident, secure in themself (and probably more charismatic because of it)," and that can absolutely mean "confident enough to be cheerfully visibly enthusiastic instead of fretting about self-image." So a lot of the people I would describe as cool do indeed get nerdily excited about things! Caterpillars are cool; language is cool; that person is cool, and they were just telling me about how caterpillars are great.
Though I admit that also, as a geek who does default to fairly reserved, I also have a kneejerk reaction in the opposite direction to geeky circles' admonitions to be excited and shout about things instead of being cool/reserved/etc. Like, being fairly quiet and reserved is how I am! I get excited about things quietly and reservedly, and express it very contextually! This is not me arguing that you're wrong in your associations with the various terms at all, for the record, so if it comes across as that I apologize; I'm just thinking aloud and poking at my own differing associations.
(I don't know if I come across as reserved in SCD circles, but the dance floor is also where I automatically go into my most extroverted mode, because of a lifetime training of The Role One Plays In This Situation. That was always true, even when I was a shy awkward teenager, and then became doubly true once I became a teacher and on committees and stuff, and thus my brain was like "oh, now I'm explicitly in an ambassadorial role too!" If I don't have enough social batteries for super social mode, I don't have enough social batteries to go to dance, because the two go together for me.)