What is Twee: the origin of a word

1967's "Smashing Time," the film that brought the word "twee" to America.

THE ORIGIN OF THE WORD 

Let us go to the pages of British humor magazine “Punch” on March 8, 1905. In a serialized story called “At a moment’s notice,” an author named “M.A.” quotes a cousin, Phyllis, a member of England’s smart society, who tends to speak in adoring contractions. “Do look at this sweet little monkey on the organ! Isn’t he deevie!” she cries out, and the author interjects to inform us that “deevie” is short for “divine.” “He’s quite too trotty for words,” Phyllis adds later. She calls his ear “ducky.” And she says “I call him perfectly twee!”

And there we have it. As far as anyone call tell, this is the first appearance in print of the word “twee,” and the author of the story confesses he hasn’t as clue what it means.

The word makes another appearance years later, in 1917, again spoken by a young woman, again a slangy expression of delight, and again meant comically. In this instance, the author was M.T. Hainsselen, a vicar who wrote light comic fiction, sometimes about the Royal Navy. In this instance, in a book called “Grand Fleet Days,” he offer a dialogue between a girl, described as “bewitchingly pretty and young,” and a Staff Paymaster named Dibbs, also known as “Toodle-ums.” In the scene, Dibbs offers the girl a tour of his ship. Dibbs, who has never really looked around the ship and is wrong about almost everything, follows as the girl scouts around eagerly, offering bombastic approval to everything she sees.

“Oh, here's another little gun; isn't it a darling!” she cries out at one point. “Isn't it just too twee for words!”

“It's only a practice gun,” Dibbs responds, and he’s probably wrong about that.

Some have theorized that “twee” is meant to represent the way children say “sweet;” they may be wrong about that. What we do know is that it started out as an expression of approval, but, at least as represented by the authors who documented the word, spoken by the sort of people who use perfectly silly words when they could instead use perfectly ordinary ones. It obviously kicked around London society for a while – it makes appearances hither and thither in print throughout the 20th century.

The word may or may not have enjoyed a renaissance in the swinging London of the 60s. At the very least, that’s when we know the word jumped the puddle to America. Buoyed by the international success of “Alfie,” Paramount Pictures acquired the American distribution rights to a film called “Smashing Time.”

This 1967 comedy starred Lynn Redgrave and was intended as a satire of the youth scene in London at the time, and was scripted by film critic George Melly. George was, at that time, well into his 40s, and he spiked his lampoon with a number of antiquated references (including naming many of the characters after Lewis Carrol’s classic nonsense poem “Jabberwocky.”) The film is loaded with young people speaking in slang, but it is entirely possible that George Melly invented some of it and borrowed other from his own childhood. At one point, the phrase “the spadiest freak-out of all time” appears, and if slang ever sounded made up, that sounds the most made up of all.

Nonetheless, Paramount seemed to think it would be a good idea to create a glossary of the phrases that appear in the film, which they distributed to American film critics. The glossary included the word “twee,” which they defined as “camp.”

TWEE INDIE POP AND BEYOND

The word really started to gain traction with the advent of an indie pop revolution that originated in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, especially bands who affected either an appreciation for the things of childhood (Belle and Sebastian, as an example, named themselves after a children’s book) or affected a deliberately immature, amateurish style. Nobody seems to know who are when the word twee first was applied to this music – the earliest mainstream reference I can find is Pete Wilby and Andy Conroy’s “The Radio Handbook” from 1994, in which the authors discusses programming “[r]aucous, modern pop songs or simple to the point of twee ballads.”

CMJ New Music Monthly developed a taste for the word and may have been largely responsible for its popularity among critics. It first appears in their pages in April, 1995, in a review of “Yes Darling, But Is It Art?” by English band Television Personalities, a band highlighted by Pitchfork magazine in 2005 as being a forerunner of the twee music revolution. Speaking of songwriter Dan Treacy, CMJ wrote that he is “one of the most of the most hate-filled lyricists ever, for all his song’s twee trappings.”

From that point on, CMJ authors turned to “twee” as an increasingly popular adjective for pop bands, applying the label to such wildly different bands as New York power punk band Fountains of Wayne, England’s oldies pop The Zombies, Alabama rock band Verbena, and French-German electropop band Stereo Total. For CMJ, “twee” didn’t represent a specific aesthetic, but instead something that can be dismissed for being too arch, too camp, or too simple.

This is unsurprising, as twee has a long history of being a dismissive phrase. It’s only in the past decade, perhaps, that the word has started to come into its own as being an expression of approval, much less a word that has been applied to an approach to art, or life. The Pitchfork article listed above, authored by Nitsuh Abebe in 2005 and titled “Twee as Fuck,” attempted to group together a wide selection of bands as twee; the title was apparently inspired by DIY t-shirts that could be seen at indie pop concerts in the 90s, suggesting that the word was self-applied before it moved into critical circles.

Since then, there have been a raft of articles grouping together an ever-growing list of art, literature, music, and other cultural expressions as twee, and attempting to articulate a common thread. (This blog, obviously, is part of that.) Film critics adopted the phrase twee to describe the films of Wes Anderson and Miranda July, while authors such as Dave Eggers and Karen Russell caused literary critics to reach for descriptions and return with “twee.”

Most of these artists weren’t setting out to create a twee aesthetic, and often the critics aren’t being flattering when they apply the phrase, but movements are almost always named after the fact and just sort of clump together hundreds of unrelated artists due to some minor parallels between their work. This is how it has always been done. Most cult movies didn’t set out to be cult movies, but, as the Cultographies website points out, the development of a cult audience necessarily involved the construction of an alternative canon: one of the features most recognizable on cult movie websites is what Cultographies refer to as “listmania.” As a result, “Caged Heat” and “The Wizard of Oz” become joined together because author Danny Peary declared both to be cult movies, even if they seem an unlikely pairing.

In some ways, the word of twee is ideal for this sort of listmania, because listmania is, itself, very twee. But what do we mean when we mean twee; what are the standards we use to put together such a list? One could make the case that like pornography, one knows twee when one sees it, especially when one sees “Shortbus,” a film about Brooklyn hipsters having unsimulated sex.

WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE MEAN TWEE

But there are some things that can be said to be consistent when we’re talking about twee. James Parker addressed the question inThe Atlantic last year in a story about  Mark Spitz’s “Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film,” a book that is, in part, an example of listmania, and a fabricated cultural history that I don’t especially agree with, so I will be fabricating my own here. (Spitz posits that twee begins with Disney and Dr. Seuss, which seems strange to me, as neither of their work strikes me as especially twee, and neither do they seem to have especially influenced contemporary artists who are viewed as twee.)

Parker in the Atlantic writes about twee with an air of dismissiveness, but he does provide a summary of Spitz’s “twee core values” that seems a useful starting place:

Twee’s core values include “a healthy suspicion of adulthood”; “a steadfast focus on our essential goodness”; “the cultivation of a passion project” (T-shirt company, organic food truck); and “the utter dispensing with of ‘cool’ as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin.”

I would add to this: Twee doesn’t simply include a suspicion of adulthood, but also a respect for the world of children’s experiences, games, and understanding of the world. Twee isn’t just about “passion projects,” but about an ongoing engagement with the aesthetics of delight and wonder. Twee celebrates eccentricity, but at the same time often expresses an almost Freudian notion that adulthood is, in part, a process of coming to terms with neurosis we developed in childhood. Twee is often draped in nostalgia, but paradoxically recognizes the limitations and problems of nostalgia. And, also paradoxically, twee often inhabits an artificial and manufactured universe, but nonetheless attempts to explore the profound and the human.

Ultimately, though, the list is discovered in its making. And so that’s what this project will be, in large part: A growing list of work that shares a twee worldview, either deliberately or accidentally. Off we go.