Twee

On our Amazon Fire Stick we have been exceedingly delighted to watch a variety of art programs.  We have been slowly working through various seasons of Sky Arts "Portrait Artist of the Year" and Sky Arts "Landscape Artist of the Year".  Both programs are from Great Britain.  

Both programs are exceptionally inspiring and enjoyable in every regard.  We have a habit/pattern of watching an episode of one of the above programs each week as we eat a "special" Sunday Breakfast together.  

Three judges..... all three are wonderful, but I especially enjoy Tai-Shan Schierenberg, who is also a well renowned painter/artist (a painting of him is shown at the top of this post).  I like listening and learning from him about art and art theory.  He has a very "teacher-like" quality in his manner of speaking that I like a great deal because he helps me to learn.

Well... the subject of this post is a word that I had not heard before watching this program....... "Twee".  This new-to-me word was one that was fairly easy to discern from the context cues of how each of the three judges would often use the term.  However, its formal definition is:

Twee - adjective (British English)

• excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental   

In looking at Google's Ngram Viewer (a web tool that attempts to show the relative usage of a given word over time), for Twee, it can be seen that it has been around for a long time (at least ~1800) but that its rate of usage (probably as a colloquial expression) took off ~2002 :

I am not sure if that will be readable or not, but the red line indicates how "twee" has taken off in usage since 2002.  

Language is fun and interesting to learn about.  I wonder if "Twee" is something more folks in Canada may be familiar with.  I do not think many in the US have heard the word often if at all.  

PipeTobacco