Meet Cute

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kelly Radke from Green River, Wyoming.

Well, what’s going on?

Well, my question is about a phrase I keep hearing in articles about romantic comedies or weddings that tend to be very personalized or really long and just all about the couple.

And the phrase is met cute or meet cute.

And it just, it sounds weird when I hear it.

I was reading an article about romantic comedies and how they’ve declined, and they were talking about how there’s a meet cute in the movie.

So this is like Entertainment Weekly or Variety or something like that?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

And then I was reading an article.

I got married last year, so I was reading about weddings.

It’s the same thing about ceremonies where somebody gets up and talks for hours and hours about the couple and how they met cute.

-huh.

So did you and your spouse meet cute?

Yeah, we met in college, but I wouldn’t say it was necessarily cute.

We didn’t have a big meet and debate class or something like that.

Okay.

So what I’m understanding here is that to meet cute then is that there’s some kind of contrivance or some kind of device by which the filmmakers bring this couple together.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

There’s two cool things I have to tell you about this.

One is we are so very lucky that the Oxford English Dictionary has recently updated its pages.

As of September 2010, they have a brand new entry for this phrase.

So they’ve done all of our homework for us, Martha.

Woo-hoo!

It’s so exciting.

I’m going to go get some coffee, okay?

I’ll be right back.

We’re going to cheat off the editors of the OED.

No, I know these people.

They’re fine people.

They do great work, so we know that we can trust this.

They’ve taken it back as far as 1941, and they define to meet cute, and it says in filmmaker’s jargon of two characters, they define it as to have an accidental meeting which leads to or is followed by romantic involvement.

And I would say that they’re kind of missing a little bit of the picture there, so to speak.

I would agree.

Because it’s not just an accidental meeting, but it’s that there’s something, there’s almost a MacGuffin, you know, almost this unnecessary event.

You know, that’s the old Hitchcock term, right?

This unnecessary event that brings you to the drama and the action that’s going to unfold, right?

There’s almost a MacGuffin there, like they pick up the wrong suitcase at the airport or they both try to get the same cab.

There’s something like that.

Their shopping carts collide and all this stuff.

Yeah, and there’s usually friction at the beginning, too.

Absolutely.

They seem to like each other, and maybe she smacks him, and he throws her over his shoulder, you know.

There’s a lot of harrumphing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It’s farcical almost.

Right.

Anyway, so they’ve done a good job.

I’m looking here, and I think I can find some uses maybe from the 1930s.

1941 is the first part of that decade.

I would not be surprised if this goes back to the 30s or even the 20s, because romance, since the very early days of filmmaking, just like the very early days of novel writing, has been a main focus.

So I would not be surprised.

And Hollywood is so rich with jargon and so rich with this crazy language that doesn’t always escape into mainstream.

But, you know, the film reviewers for the newspapers and magazines, they’re steeped in it, you know.

They pick it up from their peers in Hollywood, right?

Yeah, and it’s sort of an overly cute phrase.

I mean, Kelly, I think what might be throwing you is that you would think that the verb there would be modified by an adverb, like met cutely, right?

Is that what’s throwing you up?

It’s just it doesn’t sound right to my ears.

Right, right, right.

Exactly.

It’s almost like the phrase itself is a little cutesy, right?

Yes.

Yeah, I don’t like that.

So, Kelly, do you know any people in real life who met cute?

Not that I can think of off the top of my head.

All right.

Well, we want to round this rodeo up.

Thank you for giving us a call, Kelly.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Variety magazine has long been a source of great jargon.

A boffo source.

Baffo source.

Oh, that’s one, right.

Yeah, yeah.

They have a couple of books out.

You can find them.

Look for Variety, Slang, and Amazon.

You’ll come up with a couple of books that just have all this good Hollywood language in them.

Oh, yeah?

Oh, cool.

All right.

I’m off to do it.

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