Perhaps they had heard the new term Blitzkrieg (1939) too, although they could scarcely have realized what significance it would hold for many of them by the end of 1940. They realized they might be evacuated (removed from an area liable to aerial bombings to safer surroundings 1938), or have evacuees (1934) billeted on them. They might well be wearing their siren suits (a one-piece garment for use in shelters, later a favourite of Winston Churchill 1939). They were prepared to be chivvied into their Anderson shelters (a prefabricated air-raid shelter named after the home secretary, Sir John Anderson 1939) by air-raid wardens (1936) if the threat of German dive-bombing (1935) became reality. Soon people knew all about black-outs, this sense particular to Second World War air-raid precautions having appeared by 1935. It was becoming clear from the middle of the decade that a conflagration was almost inevitable, and neologisms began to appear that foreshadowed the coming conflict. And above all it became aware of the word Nazi (1930), which came to stand as the symbol of the evil which overtook Europe and the rest of the globe. The world learned of brownshirts (members of a thuggish Nazi militia 1932), of the gestapo (1934),the Third Reich (1930), and of the cult of the Führer (1934) and his Hitlerite (1930) followers. The terminology of economics ( hyperinflation (1930), reflation (1932)) and of destitution ( skid row (1931) and Hooverville (a temporary shanty town in America 1933)) was enlarged, and from Germany came a steady stream of vocabulary that would send a retrospective chill down the spine. The decade began in the grip of an extended economic slump, and ended with a world war. Of course, people in the 1930s had far more serious matters to claim their attention. As is usually the case with such items, the next generation found it laughably passé, but it made a storming comeback towards the end of the twentieth century.
Jazz musicians used it to talk about things they approved of, which tended to be laid-back and unforcedly stylish, and the wide popularity of jazz in the 1940s carried the usage into general youth slang in the 1950s. It emerged in African American English by the early 1930s, perhaps as a development of an earlier US slang sense ‘shrewd or clever’, which itself probably evolved from general English ‘impudent’. The history of cool as a general term of approval is a patchy affair.
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