James Griffin: Twee is in the eye of the beholder

Opinion

Apologies in advance if this one gets a little personal; a little self-indulgent, a little all-about-me. This is going to happen because, well, this one is all about me. I've got some issues I need to work through and I find it helps if I write things down.

This is hardly surprising (and also quite handy), given that I'm a writer. I am a man who makes his living writing words; I pay the mortgage and put food on the table this way. Sometimes this has been a fairly precarious existence but I've been doing okay for a while now (even though my mother still worries) so this isn't a "woe is me" column about how hard it is to be a writer who earns actual money.

No, this is about something that I wrote, then something that someone else wrote. Words, eh? They get you in trouble all over the show if you're not careful. A wee while ago a television show that I wrote, with the help of some lovely friends, went to air. It's a comedy series, which in this country is a bit like painting a big target on yourself then handing everyone who watches it a hunting rifle and daring them to take their best shot.

But I digress, because what I want to write about is what happened after the TV series first went to air. I made the mistake, possibly, of going online and checking out what the punters thought. In among many nice comments there was the sort of vitriol you expect with (a) a new TV show and especially (b) a new local comedy TV show. That was to be expected. What I didn't expect was that some of it was personally directed at me. That hurt, but I'm a big boy and I'll take it on the chin.

The one comment, however, that has stuck with me was by a rather curmudgeonly, bitter-sounding individual calling himself/herself "Phil", who suggested rather than writing komedy (sic), my "forte is writing twee, middle class, white male 'musings' for the back page of weekend newspaper magazines." Ouch.

Now without some serious surgical or cosmetic alterations, I can't do a lot about my whiteness or my maleness, so I'm stuck with those. And I was born into the middle class and have gravitated neither up nor down the socio-economic scale, so unless I get my ass seriously recessioned, I guess I'm stuck with that too.

It was the "twee" word that got me musing. Is to have your work called twee a bad or a good thing? Twee generally means that something is sickeningly sweet or overtly sentimental or affectedly dainty, or stuff along those lines.

In my extensive research into the meaning and etymology of the word twee (by going to urbandictionary.com) I also found that twee is taken, by some people, to mean marijuana; to poke someone with two fingers; having one testicle and a small penis; or poo stuck to a sheep's bottom. Go figure.

But I'm going to stick with the assumption that Phil meant twee in the sickeningly sweet sense and muse upon that for a bit. I've never thought of what I write as sickeningly sweet but I guess tweeness is in the eye of the beholder. Which brings me straight back, therefore, to the question of whether to be twee is necessarily a bad thing.

On the face of it, the answer is surely yes. Sure there are lot worse things you can call someone, but to be called twee is at least mildly insulting. Or is it?

What, come to think of it, is so wrong with a little tweeness from time to time? When I look around at what a crap old world we live in sometimes, a bit more tweeness probably wouldn't go amiss. I, for one, would exchange more saccharine for less terror in the world at large.

It is undoubtedly twee of me to suggest that maybe I should embrace my tweeness; that I should clasp it to my man-bosoms in great gushings of tweeful glee. There are countless others out there, I freely admit, much less twee than I, so I should acknowledge my rightful place in the universe, which is at the twee end of things, at the end of Twee Street. I should stand up and say: I am twee and I am proud.

Okay, I confess I'm getting a bit carried away here, to make a very simple point: that there is nothing wrong with being, for want of a better word, twee. As long as it is used responsibly. And you don't drive afterwards. And it's not used in a hateful way or to denigrate others.

So muse on this, if you will: it's okay to be twee if twee is what you think it's okay to be.