Learn English – “you seem pretty cool yourself”

meaning-in-contextpopular-refrains

What is the meaning of "you seem pretty cool yourself"?
I don't understand the "yourself" in this context.
Is this ironic and means that I find myself being cool?

Regards
Klaus

Best Answer

"Yourself" here is not the reflexive kind you might be thinking of. That is, it's not being used in the way it operates in a phrase like "you burned yourself."

In this case it is being used for emphasis. From Wiktionary:

You; used emphatically, especially to indicate exclusiveness of the referent's participation in the predicate, i.e., that no one else is involved. Ex: You yourself know that what you wrote was wrong.

But here, the kind of exclusive emphasis I suspect is even a little more particular. Even without context, my guess is that the person being referred to in "you seem pretty cool yourself" has earlier made reference to either the speaker or someone else being cool. "You seem pretty cool yourself" operates in response to this, emphasizing that the person being referred to also strikes the speaker as a cool.

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