Cute or not

“Cute” is a word people (read “my wife”) use to describe all kinds of things, and I’m constantly trying to decipher what she really means when she applies it something or someone.

For a while it seemed a fair bet that anything small and not an insect had great potential to be cute. Baby shoes are, apparently, cute enough to make a person giddy. Most puppies and kittens are cute, but not so much dogs and cats (with some exceptions, including big, furry Old English Sheep dogs).

Apparently this isn’t all that far off. Among the phrases used to define cuteness is “attractive by means of smallness or prettiness.” Another common way to describe the cute employs the word “dainty.”

There are other applications of this adjective, however, including my wife’s use of it to describe a new pair of my shoes. Men’s shoes are cute? Our feet are anything but dainty in most cases, and that’s exactly how most of us would have it. So what in a pair of men’s shoes constitutes cuteness?

Can anyone clarify this aesthetic term for me?