I’ve seen it in print before and in the Style section of todays NYTimes it appeared again. There was a picture of two people getting married and the caption read, “They met cute on an internet dating site.” What does that mean exactly? Does it mean they met in a cute fashion? Because if so that’s a pretty awkward sounding way to say that. Where does that expression even come from.
TVTropes has an entry for it. I’m not sure what it would mean in the context of a real life relationship, though. They met in a manner that seemed right out of a cheesy screenplay?
Sounds like it means a couple that meets in an unconventional way.
Since the phrase is basically about a movie convention, I’m going to move this to CS.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Here’s more on meet cute.
Pretty much by definition, meeting on an internet dating site is the antithesis of “meeting cute,” unless they started off by flaming one another.
I was just about to say that. I wonder if this term is going to wind up being used to describe how anyone met their future spouse. Although to someone who is completely unfamiliar with internet dating, it might seem whimsical and odd to meet that way.
I think this is the case, here. It’s silly, sure, since the internet shouldn’t be new and scary, but it really is to a lot of people, so…
I actually did read a “meet cute on the internet” romance novel. She was an author researching a book about internet dating and he was a cop hunting for a serial killer who met her victims while online dating. They were both pretending to be other people during the initial meet. (See how that causes :rolleyes: ?)
But as a general rule, Colibri’s right. You can’t meet cute while internet dating.
Meet Cute: As Sally walks her dog Fergy down Fifth Ave., a swarthy Latin-American man named Ronaldo purchases a salami at a local bodega. Unable to carry all of his groceries, he shoves the salami in his pants. Temporarily distracted by a display of new Versace flip-flops in a store window, Sally doesn’t notice as the leash slips from her hand and Fergy chomps down on Ronaldo’s crotch. Fortunately, he just got the salami, which everyone has a great laugh over, while Ronaldo cooks dinner for Sally and her mother, who it turns out is allergic to shellfish…
Meet Not Cute: As Sally sits in a ancient green stenographer chair, shoving fistfulls of Cheez-Its into her mouth while alternately tweezing her mustache hair and scratching her asscrack, a new message appears on her match.com profile. Perusing the sender’s stats, and sighing with the realization that this is probably as good as she’ll get, she clicks the subject line to read the rather poetic message body: “Wanna fuck?”
"Notting Hill" isn’t a movie, it’s a meet cute.
And I thought I was going to be the first Clever Billy to say that doesn’t make sense. Instead I’ll complain that TVTropes is misusing the word “trope”.
My girlfriend and one of her exes met cute. She was a college student on vacation in Spain; absorbed in the scenery of Bacelona, she stepped in front of a bus, and a hand grabbed her and pulled her to the curb. It was another American – and a rich, good-looking one. She fell for him, and that was that. (Except that they broke up soon after because he was, as her dad put it, “a cretin”. She still refers to him as “Dennis the cretin.”)
It means you should rent The Holiday, which explains the term well.
I dunno; you had me at “asscrack”.
Why is it “met cute” and not “met cutely”? Why isn’t the adverb form used?
It’s “Meet Cute”, any change to the form is up to the writer.
Or Roman Holiday! Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck meet, fall in love, and … (don’t want to spoil the ending) while having laughs and adventures in Rome.
Met cute?
It’s where a young, single man comes home after a night of pub hopping with his buds and realizes he’s forgotten the keys to his apartment so he climbs up the balcony, and entering the apartment collapses on the bed. Shortly thereafter he is awakened by a terrible screaming of a young woman in flannel pajamas with a bath towel on her head. He is apparently in his neighbor’s apartment and is curled up on her bed.
Mortified he leaps up and mumbling apologies hurries out her door to his apartment across the hallway. The next day he sends her a bouquet of roses and an apology card.
The next few weeks after the incident he is still quite embarrassed, and at best gives her a hurried nod of the head if they pass in the lobby, but otherwise avoids her. She can sense this and it kind of pisses her off although she’s not exactly sure why. The difficulty is that the she’s conflicted. She’s still upset that he invaded her space, but on the other hand she thinks he’s kind of cute. She loves the smell his hair and cologne left on her pillow, and has still not washed it since that night. The pillow he used sits on the other side of her bed like an embarrassing mark of her violation. Sometimes she falls asleep holding it to her face and is disgusted with herself in the morning for being so silly.
She googled him up to see what turned up on him. He’s a junior partner at some consulting firm. She found he has a facebook page, but she’s damned if she’s going to ask to be added as friend after he came into her apartment. She doesn’t want to let him off the hook entirely, but can’t see any way to engage him without making the first move, which she is loathe to do. She wonders if she’s holding too tightly onto her righteous anger at having her space invaded.
It’s Friday night, she’s about to get her period, and she’s horny and hungry. “Fuck him!”, she thinks! He should be asking me out to a nice restaurant, and instead he’s sitting in his apartment playing some indie mess she can hear faintly through his door. The more she thinks about it the angrier she gets and finally jumps up from the couch, scaring her cat, and marches across the hallway raising her arm to knock on his door… and hesitates… with her arm upraised. What’s she going to say? “I’m hungry! Get your indie rock listening ass out here and take me out to dinner you space invading bastard!” She’s so conflicted. She feels like crying. Damn period!
But see, if this were a movie, he’d realize what a cretin he was and reform, then come to find her and persuade her that she never really wanted to leave him.
Since they use trope exactly the way I use trope, I have to jump in and defend them.
You’re thinking of 1a, aren’t you?
I think what elfkin477 means is that in the movie Eli Wallach plays a screenwriter who worked in Hollywood’s golden age who actually explains to Kate Winslet’s character what the definition of a “meet cute” in the movies is.