“Sleepy”?! Southern Pines? Come on, Marla Roth. You can do better than that!

Or so I found myself yelling at the TV screen last week.

Roth is the host and co-producer of “North Carolina Weekend,” a weekly where-to-go, what-to-do program on UNC-TV (Channel 4 on Time Warner Cable). I find the show strangely addictive and have watched it off and on since last summer, when I discovered it by accident after UNC-TV moved it into the 8 p.m. time slot formerly held by “Washington Week.” (It also runs Thursday at 9 p.m.)

Each week, Roth and other reporters fan out from Chapel Hill to do short features on various local music festivals, barbecue restaurants, fairs, funky museums, fishing holes and historic sites around the state.

The show is subsidized by the N.C. Department of Tourism, and some might consider it shamelessly fluffy and promotional. Still, there’s a refreshingly earnest, down-home quality about it. I enjoy learning about places I’ve never visited and seeing what kind of spin they put on the ones I’m familiar with. (The host is a charmer, too, which may have something to do with it.)

So when I learned that Roth had brought a camera crew to Southern Pines to do a segment on the Moore County Choral Society’s preparation for last weekend’s Christmas program, I made a point of tuning in last Thursday.

Everything was going along fine as they showed Choral Society members rehearsing and interviewed conductor Ann Dorsey about the coming event. But then, while providing a bit of background on the community, they showed some footage of Broad Street. And that’s when I heard it: Roth, in a voice-over, making a passing reference to Southern Pines as a “sleepy little town.”

Say what?

Southern Pines is a lot of things. Unique, maybe. Or charming. I can even buy the “little” part, which is one of the reasons we all love living here. But “sleepy”? It seemed the kind of cookie-cutter word one might pull out of the drawer to describe a place he or she had never really taken the time to get to know.

My mind immediately conjured up the vision of some kind of lazy settlement in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western, where old-timers sit with their feet propped up in front of the general store as the grandfather clock ticks inside the sheriff’s office and flies buzz and a dog lies undisturbed in the middle of a dusty street.

You have to be a boring backwater with nothing going on to be “sleepy.” If the crew had panned back a little further with their camera and showed people trying to find parking places and busy stores and sidewalks bustling with locals and tourists, the viewer would immediately grasp the inappropriateness of the chosen descriptive for such a vibrant, sophisticated place.

So, after stewing about it all weekend, I phoned Roth on Monday morning. If nothing else, I thought it might be fun not to be the one on the receiving end of a call from a complaining reader/viewer for a change.

She was very nice about it. In fact, her contrition quickly disarmed me.

“I meant it as a compliment, actually,” she said, beginning to explain almost before I had finished stating my beef. “When I went through the downtown, it seemed very relaxed. Very relaxed and comfortable. Very friendly. Quaint. Maybe I should have said ‘quaint.’”

Now I was the one feeling bad. I started to tell her to forget it.

“I loved your town,” she hastened to add, the embarrassed words tumbling out. “Maybe I chose the wrong word. I apologize.”

Already regretting that I had even brought it up, I invited her to make a return trip sometime and let some of us show her all the things that make Southern Pines so special and un-sleepy. (Roth grew up in western New York state and has been an adopted Tar Heel for only three years.)

So all is forgiven, Marla.

But perhaps the rest of us could do her and others a favor by offering a more fitting adjective for Our Fair City. So let me hear from you. If you had to describe Southern Pines in one word, what would it be?