-Anti-cute brigade, unite!-

Anyone who knows me in the slightest sense knows that I am the mother of all things anti-cuteness. Meg Ryan, Hello Kitty, pink 'stuff' and the like are all sneered at and jumped on from a great height. Those who dare call me 'cute' quickly realise that is definitely not what I am and go away rubbing their shins.

In my anti-cute quest I have come up with the etymology of the word for you:



CUTE

ADJECTIVE: Inflected forms: cut·er, cut·est
1. Delightfully pretty or dainty. 2. Obviously contrived to charm; precious: “[He] mugs so ferociously he kills the humor—it's an insufferably cute performance” (David Ansen). 3. Shrewd; clever.
ETYMOLOGY: Short for acute.
OTHER FORMS: cutely —ADVERB
cuteness —NOUN

WORD HISTORY: Cute is a good example of how a shortened form of a word can take on a life of its own, developing a sense that dissociates it from the longer word from which it was derived. Cute was originally a shortened form of acute in the sense “keenly perceptive or discerning, shrewd.” In this sense cute is first recorded in a dictionary published in 1731. Probably cute came to be used as a term of approbation for things demonstrating acuteness, and so it went on to develop its own sense of “pretty, fetching,” first recorded with reference to “gals” in 1838.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.