Ruthless Rant and Rage

by Annie Beecham

Cute Overload

I have a confession: I use the word cute when I don’t mean it. This catchall adjective peppers and plagues conversations everywhere, and I won’t pretend that I’m not a repeat offender. It’s one of the defining words of the times, and it’s inescapable. I use it when something really is cute, when it’s not, when I don’t really know what I mean and when I’m just trying to fill a conversational void. He’s cute, that’s so cute, you look cute!, it was cute — What are we even trying to say? People, animals, cars, clothes, ideas — they’re all susceptible to cuteness.

The leading expert in all things etymological, The Oxford English Dictionary, doesn’t have much to say about the matter: “Used of things in same way as cunning,” and “applied to people as well as things, with the sense ‘attractive, pretty, charming,’” Perhaps the OED is most helpful when it suggests that the word originated from “schoolboy slang” — although I’d suggest schoolgirl slang, instead.

Scientists have studied the qualities that trigger cute associations in our brains, and this is what they found: a round, soft body, associated with the physical traits of an infant make a mammal cute, along with a disproportionately large head and big eyes — the very portrait of something terribly frightening. These studiers of cute have made some kind of debatable contribution to society, but they haven’t cleared up the reason why I’m abusing the word like I would a coffee pot in an office.

During my own extremely unscientific field studies, I determined that “that’s cute” is the most frequently used phrase with the word in question. Some have tried to coin their own version 2.0 of the phrase, like Ms. Paris Hilton. Hilton upped the ante with her patented “that’s cute,” but the rest of us wear well the beaten path of cute, conversation after vapid conversation.

My affair with the word has roots that trace to grade-school recess — when professing my adolescent crushes meant bashfully confessing that I thought a young lad was cute. Cute was replaced in some circumstances as I grew wise in the ways of the world with its illicit cousin, hot. The problem with hot is that one can’t say “that’s hot” without sounding like Hilton, and its double meaning — to describe the weather — makes it more complex than our simple four-letter fallback.

Hardly a dialogue goes by that I don’t find myself using the efficient, one syllable descriptor. I don’t have a problem with the actual word cute (how could I — it’s so tiny, convenient and well, cute), I’m just chased by a sense of wastefulness — more than 250,000 words make up the English language, but I keep coming back to this simple, overused adjective. Synonyms exist. But nothing is so quick and to the point — no other adjective can be so easily combined with that and is to create a vacant compliment like the word cute. Charming perhaps? Too many syllables. Neat? Too hokey. Handsome? Antiquated. I’ll keep using cute for lack of a more acceptable term, and I’ll forever be the gracious recipient of a compliment including the word cute (so keep them coming). But my new-school-year resolution: I’ll only use cute when I mean it — according to my personal observation that will reduce my serial cute-use by 50 percent. A cute idea, right?