Twee

All my cute remarks about an "imaginary anthology" have become kind of quaint and precious and twee, and so we're striking them from the record... or at least we're going to resist them in the future. But man did I read a good short story today. It's called "Two Words" and it's by Molly Giles. I found it in the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. It's worth seeking out. Hey, is "twee" a word? What does it mean? It's not in my dictionary, but I'm sure it's a word. I'm going to ask some of my linguistically minded "Blog" Buddies to write in and tell me why "twee" does not appear in my 1981 Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. I believe Phil Oppenheim may have even used it in conversation the other day. That reminds me of another good word that's not in the dictionary: blee. I ran across it in the Burton translation of the Arabian Nights tales a few years ago. Burton described a djinn as being "black of blee." My friend Jon Host found "blee" in an early-20th-century dictionary. It meant "countenance," I think. Is this "blogging"? I'm still not sure.