In a word: twee

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:

TWEE

Meriting consideration for adoption into American English, the British twee does not have an exact counterpart here. And it also illustrates a frequently observed tendency of words with positive connotations to accumulate negative ones, such as egregious.

Twee, which the Oxford English Dictionary conjectures derives from “an infantile pronunciation of sweet,” originally bore the sense of “sweet,” “dainty,” or “chic,” as in this citation from 1917: “Oh, here's another little gun; isn't it a darling! Isn't it just too twee for words!”

It speedily took on the senses of "affectedly dainty or quaint; over-nice, over-refined, precious, mawkish," as in a citation from the Listener in 1983: "Mike Nichols's thriller-fantasy about dolphins should be as nauseatingly twee as the worst Disney—but it isn't."

A word this useful deserves greater traction.

Example: From "Notes from the Far East," by Tony Perrottet in Esquire, August 1997, describing New York's East Village: "You can find a twee French-provincial restaurant, Jules (65 St. Marks Place), full of manicured diners looking as if they've been teleported in from Connecticut, then stroll around the corner to a drag party called Studio Filthy Whore (e-mail them at filthyhoaol.com)."

In a word: twee

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