Thing To Do Today: be cute.

Being cute is easier for some of us:

then others:

All the same, it's worth a try.

What you need to do is arouse other people's protective instincts, so take the lowest chair you can and practise your most adoring gaze.

If you can manage to laugh at even very bad jokes, that will help, too.

It may be, however, that the last thing you want to do is let other people feel powerful. In this case you can always be cute in its sense of clever or shrewd.

If you're very clever, then you might even manage to be both at once, and then you can get a job as a diplomat or a salesman.

After all, it's the same difference.

Thing To Do Today: be cute. In the sense of clever, this word is a shortened form of acute, which comes from the Latin acus, needle. How it came to mean attractively vulnerable none of my dictionaries is saying.