How do you feel when you see something cute?

When you see something funny, you feel amused. When you see something scary, you feel frightened. What’s the word for the emotion you feel when you see something cute?

Caption: Something cute.

I guess some people would answer “indifferent”. But many of us feel an emotion, and we express it by going “Aww!” or “Nyaww!” How come we don’t have a word for that?

“Delight” is close, but it’s not specific enough. You can delight in tasty food, clever wordplay, etc, and none of those are the “Nyaww!” emotion.

You could try “adoration”, by extension from “adorable”, but the meaning is different (like how “terror” is not the reaction to a “terrific” thing, at least not in modern English). “Adoration” sounds like the emotion you might feel towards God, or the night sky, or a person you’re in love with, or a celebrity you admire: it’s an upward-directed emotion, whereas reacting to cuteness is a downward-directed one.

(It can make sense to offer “adoration” to a cat, but only in the same semi-tongue-in-cheek context in which people talk about cats as deities accepting their rightfully deserved worship from their human underlings. It wouldn’t make much sense to offer “adoration” to a fuzzy duckling or a roly-poly panda.)

Maybe in the future the word “cute” itself will get extended to describe this emotion — like how “suspicious” does double duty (you feel suspicious when you see something suspicious). And seeing someone react to cuteness can itself be cute, especially if the person is a young child.

The really unusual thing is that in older books people seemed to use “pity” to describe this emotion. (Although the only citation I can find for this now is from Three Men in a Boat: “When I meet a cat, I say, “Poor Pussy!” and stop down and tickle the side of its head” plus the existence of the old parlour game “Poor Pussy”, both of which imply something like pity, but don’t actually use the word. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the actual word “pity” more than once to describe the reaction of a person meeting a cat or other animal, in something like Little Women or Anne of Green Gables, but I’ve searched the texts of those and not found it. Any pointers welcome!)

That (if it is indeed real and I haven’t imagined it) seems mismatched to me. Pity is what you feel when you see a person or animal suffering. Reaction-to-cuteness and pity are both downward-directed emotions, but one is positive and pleasant to experience, and the other is negative and unpleasant to experience.

(Although I guess both are expressed by a sound usually written as “Aww!”…)

This is a bit like Homer’s famous “wine-dark sea”. The ancient Greeks didn’t perceive the sea as red, but the explanation goes that they perceived the depth of a colour as more significant than its hue, so they could compare the sea to wine because it was like wine in the most important way. So maybe (this is very speculative) the Victorians cared more about the upward-looking or downward-looking aspect of an emotion than about its positivity or negativity, and they noticed that reaction-to-cuteness was very like pity in its downward-looking-ness?

And it is possible for pity and reaction-to-cuteness to overlap, although they usually don’t in my experience. If you see a roly-poly kitten tumble off a sofa or something, you might go “Aw, poor kitty!” but be smiling because it’s cute (and you don’t think the kitten is seriously hurt). Maybe Victorians’ experience with cute animals was usually in the context of seeing them suffer minor injuries and indignities? Or maybe there’s a kind of “dumb / lower animals” thing going on: maybe in the Victorian mind animals are inherently pitiable because they’re inferior to humans, and the reaction you experience when you see one must be an expression of this fact. Maybe the amused pity I feel for a kitten tumbling off a sofa is what a Victorian felt for a kitten merely existing and suffering the indignity of being a kitten?