English is weird.Etymology Onlines tells me that "cold" as a noun used to meaning having caught a cold only goes back to the 16th century. It's from earlier use of the word to describe illness from actual exposure to cold such as hypothermia or having the chills.
Catching a chill is pretty much unchanged all these centuries. But it means something entirely different to have a chilling effect on speech or to chill out or to chill's someone's spirits.
And then there's "cool". My favorite use of which comes from Abraham Lincoln, "That is cool". Out of context old Honest Abe seems hip. But really he's just using "cool" to mean "cold" to mean "unmoved by feeling" which goes back to a late Old English meaning for "cold".
And that only scratches the surface. By the seventies we have English language commercials for Mr. Microphone with hip teens arguing over whether "it's hot" or "it's cool" when they both mean the same thing.
What a tangled web we weave here.
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