Cool beans

Don't be decieved, cool beans is an appealing expression, fun, whimsical, but in any context it is a misnomer. Cool beans are never cool.

“I wanted to say something nice about my sisters fiancee, but since there was nothing sincerely nice to say, I simply said "Cool beans"”

~ Oscar Wilde on Cool Beans

Cool Beans is a common expression that is often said when something cool happens or if something is particularly cool. It is considered one of the greater ironies of modern day life as it is rarely or never said by cool people. In fact saying "cool beans" immediately makes you the opposite of cool. While saying cool beans makes you un-cool, it does not necessarily mean that the thing you called cool beans, itself is un-cool. In other words, it is not always a reflection on the thing you are referring to.

Lets explore this further. If you say U2 is "cool beans", it means you are not cool because you said cool beans. However this does not automatically mean that U2 is not cool. However, in this case, the object, U2 is immensely not cool at all. U2 is obscenely un-cool in every way and Bono seems to do everything he can to be less and less cool every day.

Lets investigate another example. Say you are at a party with super models and football players and South African surfers and you say cool beans. Again, you automatically label yourself one giant loser. But this doesn't mean the party is not cool. In fact, it sounds like a fresh ass shin-dig that everyone would want to go to. The party was most likely very cool and we ought to find out what you were doing there...if you called it cool beans which we hope you didn't.

Origin

A rare kind of bean, the cool bean is only found in places where people are unable to stop commenting on things and in particular, in locations where people are bored, lame or bored and lame. The origin comes from a french term brought to America in the 70s when French people admitted that America had something to add culturally to the world, including parties that didn't revolve around everyone else's opinions and mainly people having fun, being themselves and very very very large budgets to fund extravagant CD recordings, block buster films and world wild publishing sensations. The old rick with money came to the US and hung out at parties giving their opinions about everything. No one knows when exactly they stopped being invited to these parties but a horrible legacy of their brief stay is with us today. The term "cool beans" which French hipsters said a lot and some how caught on. This however does not explain why the term is still used decades later. No one knows why people still say it. This is still the case even after it has been proven time and time again that it is a lame phrase used only by lame people, or on rare occasions, really cool people using it ironically. Its one utility is that it gives anyone conscious of what is cool, to know what is not cool, based on if someone says "cool beans" or not.

But also, some cool people do say cool beans if they are from certain places, such as small towns in Buckinghamshire.

Etymology

Is this "cool beans" or isn't it? Yes it is cool beans, in the sense that, it actually isn't cool at all.

Cool beans comes from a mis-translation of the verb coer which means something along the lines of "that is something that emits interesting vibes". Coer comes from a Frisian song (the Fries are a germanic-minority in the north of Holland and Germany who speak a language apparently similar to English even though no Anglophone could possibly understand a world they say). The song is about a bird that doesn't care about life and instead hangs out, does its own thing and says whether it likes stuff or not. Its shrill squeak is something like "ahhhhhxxxxx?ggggggrrrrrrrhhhxxxxx". The frisians write this as "kooh kooh" and it is pronounced more or less like that in the song. The intention of the song was to show that this bird was judging everyone. The French completely missed this and adopted the "kooh" in the french form "coer" as though it was a good thing to tell people all the time if you approved of something or not. As boring as this may all sound, the linguistic mix up makes it even more agonizingly boring to read. This is the sort of thing you would have to listen about at these parties, phonetic changes, lexical modifications and horrifyingly boring explanations about something people would rather not know about. This mistranslation of a one hit Frisian wonder band from the 70s left us with the irritating phrase and we have francophones to blame.

It is no coincidence that French people started the phrase. They are the nation of cool acting people who have never been, certainly are not now nor could possibly hope to reach any level of coolness. The phrase cool beans, the bastardization of some hip french word caught on in the United States and spread like wild fire for a while, when liberated geeks experimented with being cool.

Wall Street Crash

In 1987, a coffee bean delivery vehicle collided with the limo of a very easy going wall street investor. His response was, cool beans. This was the first moment it became official that cool beans was a remarkably non-cool thing to say. Wall street investors, while rich, accessible to lots of cocaine, whores and parties, being machistic and verile: are absolutely the anti-cool of human beings in the world. They are boring, lame, flaky soulless humans who only see things as cool if other people do. That is not the meaning of cool. Something is cool if you assert it to be cool, not copying others in moments of dullness. The reaction of "cool beans" is not only corny, and fluff talk, but also ridiculous. It is an anti-inherent truth. An anti-tautology. Beans exploding out of a truck are never cool beans. It is a waste of food, a lot of stuff to clean up and inconvenient for everyone.

That same day a lot of wall street investors lost a lot of money and committed suicide. There was no net loss for anyone (non financially that is).

The Future

This is as cool as beans get.

Various fast food chains, mentioning no names tried to market cool food in many ways. When taco bell introduced the "cool refried beans mega burrito wrap", it failed instantly and the marketing manager was fired. It is considered one of the most spectacular failure in advertising history.

Controversy

In 2006 there was a brief controversy surrounding the etymology of cool beans. Some thought to mention that no one cares, but, in fact, that no one cares would be exagerating the definition of the importance of anything in the universe. To say that no one cares if there is life in some seventh dimensional galaxy that we can never see, experience, confirm or in anyway help us in our life time, is far less unimportant than the etymology of cool beans. It might have something to do with the french as mentioned before, but it might also have something to do with the ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz