meet cute
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈmiːt ˌkjuːt/
ipa: /ˈmit ˌkjuːt/
Forms: form: meet cutes
form: meet-cute
Etymology: Accidentally coined by German-American film director Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947), who had difficulty speaking English, to describe the encounter between the characters played by Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper in the 1938 film Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.
Senses: examples: text: If this is a distortion of reality, it is a knowingly utopian gesture, and the wit of such conceits lies in placing in tension the ideal with the real and so being more than a series of fancy ‘meet cutes’: […]
ref: 1989, Bruce Babington, Peter William Evans, Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes, Manchester; New York, N.Y.: Manchester University Press, →ISBN, page 11:
text: The hunt for love saturates Western culture. […] Romantic comedies have characters discover one another serendipitously, called "meet-cutes." The lead clumsily spills a drink on his future love interest, setting off a chain of events to love. Meet-cutes affirm the idea that possibility is all around us: love can happen anywhere, at anytime, and with anyone.
ref: 2013, Jaime Woo, “How to Find Love on Grindr (if You Hafta)”, in Meet Grindr: How One App Changed the Way We Connect, Canada: [Lulu.com], →ISBN, page 108, column 1:
text: In some respects, it might be too faithful to the genre it savages; as in many real rom-coms, the energy flags during the plot’s backstretch, and audiences may share the drifting interest of Kyle (Bill Hader) and Karen (Ellie Kemper), who come to regret ever asking Joel and Molly to chronicle their meet-cute.
ref: 2014 June 26, A. A. Dowd, “Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler Spoof Rom-com Clichés in They Came Together”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 07 Dec 2017:
text: When Wade first crosses paths with Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), the ass-kicking fellow “gunter” (or egg hunter) with whom he becomes infatuated, the pair’s meet cute is predicated on the swapping of favorite pop-culture quotes.
ref: 2018 March 26, A. A. Dowd, “Steven Spielberg Finds Fun, and maybe even a Soul, in the Pandering Pastiche of Ready Player One”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 31 May 2018:
text: Café Pick Me Up was a cosy little place with a low pressed-metal ceiling, crammed full of tiny tables, with French cafe chairs and mellow lighting. If you were to write a romcom featuring a meet cute, you’d set it there.
ref: 2021 December 26, Alys Fowler, “My winter of love: I was homesick in New York. The quiet Danish poet was just what I was longing for”, in The Guardian:
topics: human-sciences
linguistics
narratology
sciences
synonyms: cute meet
glosses: A situation in a film, television series, etc., in which a potential romantic couple meet for the first time in a way that is considered adorable, amusing, or cute.
examples: text: A short meet-cute dialogue ensues, detailing exactly how many hours of interviews [Steven] Levitt had agreed to (two), and exactly how much of his time [Stephen] Dubner actually ended up taking (three days).
ref: 2015 May 15, Steven D[avid] Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner, “Freakonomics 10 years on: Stephen J Dubner and Steven D Levitt on what they got right and wrong”, in The Guardian, London, archived from the original on 26 Oct 2017:
glosses: Any such situation occurring in real life between a pair of people who are not yet acquainted, romantically or otherwise.