DON'T Call Me "Cute."

Unless a girl has shiny, pink cheek circles and pigtails, do not fucking call her "cute."

So the other day, one of my daughter’s young friends commented that I was “cute.” Oh, my holy mother, no she didn’t. I know exactly what she meant by that, and it sure as hell wasn’t “adorable” and “dainty.” The absolute last thing a woman of my advanced age wants to be called is “cute.” All right, there is at least one other “c” word that’s probably the #1 thing a woman never wants to be called, but “cute” still ranks up there. Cute is no longer an appropriate adjective for anyone with a double-digit age. What my offspring’s friend meant was, Your mom is kind of fat and round and tubby and jolly, and she says dirty words that make me feel all giggly and naughty, so I consider her a cross between Shrek and a farm animal with excess gas. THAT is what cute really means. It is clearly a pejorative employed when the judger feels superior to the judgee. Just like nice.

When I was in high school, my favorite English teacher set my class straight from the first day when she instructed us never, ever, ever to use the word nice again. Her point was that we better not write things like, “The book, Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, was nice. I thought the main character, Pip, was a nice guy. In my essay, I plan to tell you all of the nice qualities of the book and its nice main character.” Besides the fact that a student who writes like that obviously has limited growth beyond the brain stem, he/she will be responsible for his teacher’s suicide when—after reading that load of complete shit— she repeatedly smashes her head into the mint green cinderblock wall of the school, which needed renovating 40 years ago and smells like feet.

But, Mrs. S. was also trying to impart on her charges the realization that the word nice is so overused that it has become bland and meaningless. Much like Sheen. Both of those terms used to mean something positive, but now they’re just yadda-yadda-yadda fillers. If you are dating a guy whom all of your friends describe as nice, you should ditch him faster than the Democrats are cutting loose Weiner, and also probably find some new fucking friends who aren’t such bitches. Nice is as horrible a thing to say about a fellow as sweet.

Sweet, when it’s not used to mean (gag) “awesome,” is a designation whose translation when uttered by skinny, popular girls is roughly, Aw. Poor, fat guy who would love to get his plump sausage fingers near my panties, but who will never get laid in his life unless he drops sixty pounds, clears up that criminal acne and learns how to walk down the hall without releasing toxic bursts of assbreeze with each step. You all know as well as I that when you dared to thrust your yearbooks into the chilly hands of the “elite” back in school, that you got back pages and pages of inked messages like, “Your a nice girl who I will never forget.” And, “I hope we keep in touch. Stay sweet and cute!”  

If you were anything like I was, you sniggered at the stupidity of jocks and bow-heads who didn’t know how to spell you’re and who thought that who was the right relative pronoun to use in that sentence. You also probably said shit like, “Hold on. I can’t remember what Mark said he wanted,” while pretended to be ordering those three Whopper meals for other people in the Burger King drive-through on the way home. And you prayed for the day when someone, anyone—except for that drunk, smelly guy outside the 7-11—referred to you as “hot.” Unfortunately, you didn’t realize that by the time you’d finally earn that pinnacle of description it would only be when you were in the bowels of menopause, and your husband declared you “hot” because he wanted you to move to your side of the fucking bed and quit sweating all over him.