How did the Barbie doll get its name?
Barbie was designed by Ruth Handler and named after her daughter. However, she didn’t realize that the original moulds came from an existing German doll named Lili, a popular cartoon prostitute of the time. At first stores refused to stock the anatomically correct doll, until it was neutralized in 1959. By the way, Barbie’s measurements if she were life-sized are 39-23-33 ... still pretty sexy.

Why are shopping centres called “malls”?
Shopping centres mushroomed in the 1950s but weren’t called malls until 1967. Mall comes from the popular sixteenth-century Italian ball and mallet game palamaglio, which came to England as pall-mall (pronounced “pell mell”). By the eighteenth century the game had been forgotten, except on the name of a London street where it had been played and on a parallel ritzy avenue named the Mall, where fashionable aristocrats strolled and shopped.

Why is something pleasing said to be “cool”?
Cool, like groovy, was a very popular expression of satisfaction during the 1960s and early ‘70s, but only the former lives on. Cool surfaced in the early nineteenth century and, like groovy, which meant “in the groove,” as in a smoothly played vinyl record, it was popularized in the modern era by bebop jazz musicians in the 1940s. Cool means unfazed and under control, like being on ice, which is real cool.