Matt Goodman, intrepid senior editor of D CEO, just got his first look at the September cover of D Magazine. Did he exclaim over the beautifully moist brisket that still made his mouth water after months of taste testing? Did he note how the hot pink “Barbecue!” headline perfectly picked up the fuschia hue of the red onion slices? Was he stunned by the clever use of a white Styrofoam palette set on a blue-and-white checkerboard backdrop, as opposed to the ubiquitous use of brown paper and metal trays by numerous other less inventive publications?
No.
Instead, he popped his head above my cubicle wall to inquire, “What does ‘meat cute?’ mean?”
To which a chorus of editors from D Weddings replied, “A meet cute! Like in The Holiday!”
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In the 2006 rom com, Eli Wallach, playing an aging script writer, explains the meaning of the term to Kate Winslet, playing an English woman vacationing in California, by describing the 1938 meet cute between Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.
“It’s how two characters meet in a movie. Say a man and a woman both need something to sleep in, and they both go to the same men’s pajama department. And the man says to the salesman: ‘I just need bottoms.’ The woman says: ‘I just need a top.’ They look at each other, and that’s the meet cute.”
The meat cute, on the other hand, is a pun. A pun is joke exploiting the different possible meanings of two words that sound alike but have different meanings and spellings (meat, meet). Tim Rogers and Zac Crain, one of whom wrote the cover line that confused Matt Goodman, love puns but are afraid of homophones. Homophones are basically puns with no joke involved, which may be in part why they don’t like them. The other reason is that, because they are words that sound the same but are spelled differently, they are the bane of editors who easily miss flower for flour or pear for pair.
Although I’m good at spotting homophones, I often mistakenly refer to them as homonyms, which drives Tim crazy. Homonyms are two words spelled and pronounced the same but with different meanings. Homographs, on the other hand, are words that are spelled the same but can have different pronunciations (sow as in pig and sow as in seeds). I’ve had a weird brain block ever since I used homonym by mistake and now I always second guess my word choice and end up with the same wrong one. Like the battle of wits in The Princess Bride, I somehow always pick the poisoned goblet.
When what I really want is some cute meat from Lockhart Smokehouse. And one of those deviled eggs. While watching a rom com meet cute with Matt Goodman.
