Turn that frown upside down!
Don’t worry, this isn’t an exhortation
to cheer up. I hate those. When people tell me to cheer up, it just makes me
want to stab them harder. But
I learned something really interesting at GRL, and since then I’ve been sharing
with everyone. Ask J.A. Rock. I shared it with everyone she introduced me to on
our recent road trip.
First of all, my apologies to whoever
brought this up at the panel at GRL. I missed your name, but I’ll take your
wisdom to my grave!
So here it is: did you know that
“frown” means two very different things, depending on whether or not you use UK
English, or American English? Really.
Ask an American what part of the body
you frown with, and they’ll tell you it’s the mouth.
The mouth! How crazy is that? (Clearly
I am on the UK English side of the argument.) In the UK—and the rest of the
commonwealth, I guess—we frown with our foreheads. What we call a frown is
probably what Americans would think of as a scowl. And what they call a frown,
we would think of as a downturned or grimacing mouth.
On our road trip, J.A. and I listened
to the audio books of our Playing the Fool series, narrated by the awesome Nick J Russo. And every time Mac
frowned—and Henry is as annoying as fuck, so this happened a lot times—we had
to try and remember who wrote that section, and what Mac was actually doing
with his face. It’s weird to think we’ve been writing together for so long, and
never suspected we were envisaging two entirely different things.
“He’s scowling!” I insisted when we got
to one line with a cranky Mac. “Why would he be doing that weird thing with his
mouth?”
“What? Frowning?” J.A. asked me.
I hate her sometimes.
She has a point when it comes to the
emoji. It’s called a frowny face, and it’s clearly all to do with the mouth.
Otherwise instead of :( it would be ):( Which actually
looks like an emoji for a corset. But, like the rest of the UK-English speaking
world, I guess I thought the forehead scowl was implied. Or that instead of
seeing that as the eyes and the mouth, why not tilt your head and see it as the
eyes and the forehead. With no mouth at
all.
The point is, emojis aside,
I’m going with dictionary.com which defines a frown as “to contract the brow, as in displeasure
or deep thought; scowl.”
This woman here, who I found on an ad for wrinkle treatment, is frowning. She's probably annoyed because she's only in her twenties and some asshole thinks she needs botox already.
This guy here though? I don't know what's going on with his face, but that's not a frown.
I’m not
frowning at all as I write this though. I’m laughing, because just when I think
I’ve finally got the hang of this language in all its weird local variations,
it throws something like that at me.
And when I say laughing, hopefully
that means the same thing to everyone reading this. But who even knows anymore?
