It’s not often that a word or phrase says one thing, yet means its opposite.
Yeah, right.
No, really, it’s true. For example, ‘blood is thicker than water’ means the reverse of what you think. The full phrase is ‘The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’. Thus, people who have formed a bond and sealed it with their blood, as in soldiers—or pirates, who are also soldiers, in a freelance-navy-man sort of way—are closer than blood relations.
Isn’t that cool?
Well, somewhat. It certainly is novel and unexpected, but we hesitate to call it… cool, and that’s because the word ‘cool’ hasn’t actually denoted the idea of ‘fashionable, hip, desirably different’ since about the last Ice Age.
There was a time, back when dinosaurs trod the Jurassic world, when the palindromic phrase ‘so cool it’s hot; so hot it’s cool’ actually meant something. In this late Holocene, however, just like the late—we should say, ‘dearly departed’—not-so-great ‘great’, ‘cool’ is a pale shadow of its once bracing self, a shriveled atavism ripe for routine surgery.
If someone advertises something to you as ‘cool’, count on it being no frostier than lukewarm, and feel free to inquire whether the water in that finger bowl is scented with lime or kumquat.
If there’s a choice, cool your hands in the latter.
