Is there a difference between 'hear' and 'listen' in Standard English?
Word Usage – Difference Between ‘Hear’ and ‘Listen’
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Related Solutions
Originally, cool meant someone who was somewhat standoffish in their demeanour, or someone who does not get too involved - and cold was just a more extreme form of that.
As Bill Franke points out, the meaning of cool meaning popular or trendy probably originated with cool jazz in 1945 and began being used to describe people in the 1950s seeing a rise in usage through the 1960s and a large spike in popular usage in the 1980s and 90s:
For this reason, "he's a cool guy" in modern English means "He is a trendy (or fashionable) person" rather than "His character is standoffish", whereas the meaning for cold never evolved to mean trendy, and retains its older meaning of someone who is very detached and unemotional.
If you want to use cool in the sense of someone who is slightly unemotional, you might prefer to use the idiom He's a cool cat or He's a cool character which both retain the old (non-trendy) meaning of the word cool. Alternatively you can say something like His response was somewhat cold as a less ambiguous alternative to His response was cool.
That website you quoted is right. In general, we can think of the action of hearing as passive listening. Consider these two hypothetical situations involving a phone conversation:
I'm sorry, I didn't hear what you said. You were breaking up. Could you please repeat that?
In this scenario, it's not your fault that you couldn't hear what the person on the other end was saying. You couldn't hear him because of a technical issue.
Gosh, I'm sorry, I wasn't listening to you. I was doing something else here. I was trying to get rid of this annoying pop-up window on my screen. Could you say that one more time please?
In this situation, it is now your fault that you couldn't hear the other person. You had all the potential to listen to your interlocutor, but you weren't because you were busy doing something else.
And the same thing, of course, applies to situations when we're talking about music:
I've heard some Guns N' Roses music, but I've never listened really closely to it.
Best Answer
To hear is to physically experience the sense of sound. As long as one's ear and brain are capable of processing sound waves, one can hear.
To listen is to deliberately apply the ability to hear. One who listens is thinking about what is heard, what it means, how to respond, and whether to continue to listen/pay attention.
Imagine three people seated together, with two of them speaking to one another. The third, temporarily not involved in the conversation, pulls out a phone and begins doing stuff with it, ignoring the conversation. This third person can hear the conversation, but is not listening to it.
(A person who is deaf might be said to be listening to a conversation if they can read lips, but it would be more correct to use a term such as engaged or participating.)
Note that there is some overlap in common usage:
is a common idiomatic expression of