Dear Seampersons and Seamstresses,
Isn't it delightful? Five letters 's' in seamstresses! I wonder if there is a word with even more....
From time to time here at the Dodo we wonder if we have gone too far, so I ask you: Is this too cute? Or does it stay just inside of cute enough to use without crossing over into the dangerous territory of 50 plus year olds in Hello Kitty wear?
As I recall Hello Kitty it was a kind of a mysterious exotic thing from the Far East made out of tiny pom-poms, a group of connected pink and white balls- I thought it came out of an oversized gum ball machine at a grocery store in Pasadena, but that seems like it cannot be right. In any case, it was very small, maybe 1.25 inches high, and it was a Big New Thing. This of course was back in the days when cute meant really only very young kids, and you certainly didn't want to be cute if you were over age 7; or, it meant you were being sarcastic and what you meant by the word cute was that you really couldn't stand to be in the room with it. For example: X tosses mud at you, and laughs hysterically, you respond: real cute, X, reeeaal cute.
The thing about all this cuteness of course, is that we all weren't really planning for our future- postulating in the late 1970's that Hello Kitty wasn't maybe going to be the right thing for us in 40 years. However, I am going to defend the 50, 60, 70, etc., year olds' right to sport Hello Kitty wear. People often say this or that thing that I am wearing is 'cute' and I always bear in mind that they don't mean it in the way I first understood the word. Although, sometimes I can still hear X laughing.
