Cool still in love with cigarettes, booze and drugs. It now admits women but it loves violence far more than it used to. It still loves the sharp clothes and haircuts, but has discovered a preference for winners over losers. It still loves the night, and flirts with living on the edge.
Cool is an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express defiance to authority - whether that of the parent, the teacher, the police, the boss, or the prison warden. Put more succinctly, we see Cool as a permanent state of private rebellion. Permanent because Cool is not just some "some phase that you go through", something that you "grow out of" but rather something that once attained remains for life; private because Cool is not a collective political response but a stance of individual defiance, which does not announce itself in strident slogans but conceals its rebellion behind a mask of ironic impassivity. This attitude is the process of becoming the dominant type of relation between people in Western societies, a new secular virtue. No-one wants to be goos any more, they want to be Cool.
From Cool Rules_ anatomy of an attitude (Pountain and Robins, 2000)
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