RFI: Twee

1. buy an expensive pen,

2. close your eyes

3. draw a little heart

4. stare at it intently; romanticize your childhood.

emo-boy shame and twee-girl infantilism go hand in hand

1. Originally: ‘sweet’, dainty, chic. Now only in depreciatory use: affectedly dainty or quaint; over-nice, over-refined, precious, mawkish. (Maura might be interested to hear that the secondary definition reads simply: "Dave Knapick." 1905 Punch 8 Mar. 178/1, ‘I call him perfectly twee!’ persisted Phyllis. 1917 M. T. HAINSSELIN Grand Fleet Days xv. 91 Girl: Oh, here's another little gun; isn't it a darling! Isn't it just too twee for words! 1947 E. HYAMS William Medium viii. 164 ‘Isn't he twee!’ said Mary, and pinched his cheek. 1956 G. DURRELL Drunken Forest x. 193 ‘What twee individuals?’ ‘Those knowledgeable sentimentalists who are forever telling me that it's cruel to lock up the poor wild creatures in little wooden boxes.’ 1962 Observer 25 Mar. 25/3 She has a small and, it must be said, pretty twee cottage. 1967 E. SHORT Embroidery & Fabric Collage iv. 102 The best of our designers who have abandoned the rather ‘twee’ decorative type of embroidered picture. 1973 G. ROBYNS Wimbledon xxix. 192 There is..a twee Arcadian outdoor studio complete with white trellis and plastic flowers. 1983 Listener 21 July 33/1 Mike Nichols's thriller- fantasy about dolphins should be as nauseatingly twee as the worst Disney--but it isn't.

I think the OED writers need to spend some time on the American indiepop scene. Or the Sinister list. I got bored of banging on about how 'twee' was not a fucking recommendation.

and I accidently broke someone's heart once...

there is a tendency in emo to be ashamed of one's maleness, and about sex in general- twee, then, provides an escape from both. you can be a kid forever! the problem is that sexually frustrated and ashamed boys who approach tweeness often do so as a sort of escape from sexuality (so do girls i suppose) and from the pain of dealing with the unpleasant aspects of maleness- avoidance, basically. Its fun to be a kid! but painful cognitive dissonance between your cute twee exterior and your unrecognized misogyny is NOT fun, and it is not twee. so while twee-boys might see their tweeness as a sort of inverse- riot-grrl refusal of traditional gender roles, in a sense they're engaging in a repression of internal (and external) conflict that is practically reactionary.

ugh. i'm tired. am i making any sense?

The kitty looks wet. He needs to be toweldried.

x-post (bah, ruin my joke why don't you, pinky?)

Email away, Pink. I rarely get emails from ILX0rs. Woe is me.

Surely if you were truly twee you wouldn't be prone to bouts of violence?

I EXPRESS YOU WITH MITTENS: http://creativezaida.freeservers.com/kitten.html

So you record an album of noisy, distorted pop, full of expletive-songs about drinking beer and you and your girlfriend's cats -- nü twee or tweecore or twëë.

Merzböys to thread!

I had a dream last night that my family was in a spaceship that crashed on an alien planet covered in dune-like mounds that were the consistency of meringue, or maybe slightly harder. A friendly female alien came and took my family to the alien city, which was enclosed in glass walls, like the biosphere. It had different levels, the bottom level was the residential area. Then we went up to the second level by sitting on floating chairs. This was the business area, and it looked like a combination of a mall food court and a busy Hong Kong street. Yanc3y was there, and he was eating pizza. We started talking about how he grew up in Malaysia and I grew up in India and the differences and similarities (note, IRL I did grow up in India but I don't think Yanc3y grew up in Malaysia). That's about all I remember.
-- Nick A. (emmaa...), March 11th, 2003.

Twee tag radio on Last.fm:

http://www.last.fm/listen/globaltags/twee

Let's see how many songs you can take.

now i know why it's called last.fm.. I lasted 0.25 songs

There's some bad tagging in there, but I got Final Fantasy, Field Mice "You're Kidding, Aren't You," and Club 8 -- these are things I like!

pretty much. i got rocketship! first try!

some bastard has tagged my stuff as 'twee'. they must die

Wasn't me jim.