When is a smile a "smirk"? The dictionary says, when it's affected or simpering or silly and conceited looking.
But I'd like a deeper psychological explanation of what is supposed to be in the mind of the smirker and how observers of smiles decide they have a window into that mind. My hypothesis is: People see what they want to see. That means: When people tell you what they think they see about the inside of another person's head, they are opening a window for us to peer into their head.
And, of course, that means that if we talk about what we think we see in the mind of the observer of another person, we too reveal ourselves. We express misunderstandings and expose ourselves to being misunderstood. That's human life. I think it's quite wonderful, but it can be dangerous and painful.
Here are some the OED's examples of the use of "smirk":
?1570 T. Ingelend Disobedient Child sig. D.ivv Howe many smyrkes, and dulsome kysses?My son John had a couple tweets yesterday pushing back against Slate:
1601 B. Jonson Fountaine of Selfe-love Palinodia sig. Mv From Spanish shrugs, French faces, Smirks, Irps, and all affected Humors.
1675 W. Wycherley Country-wife iv. 56 He has the Canonical smirk, and the filthy, clammy palm of a Chaplain.
1718 Lady M. W. Montagu Let. Sept. (1965) I. 439 A jolly face and a stupid smirk in his countenance.
How is it OK to make a national news story out of not liking someone's smile? Mocking someone's smile is as bad as telling someone they have to smile more, and we're all supposed to think the latter is blatantly offensive, right?— John Althouse Cohen (@jaltcoh) January 21, 2019
Slate's Facebook post of this article calls the kid's facial expression "the smirk of evil." I don't know how adults can sleep at night after publicly trashing a kid and calling him "evil."— John Althouse Cohen (@jaltcoh) January 21, 2019
So I clicked through to the Slate article, "The MAGA Teenager Who Harassed a Native American Veteran Is Still Unnamed, but We’ve Seen His Face Before." This is by Ruth Graham, from January 19th and with no update, and it's really creepy. Here are the last 2 paragraphs, which tell us so much about what's inside Ruth Graham's head:
But I think the real reason the clip has spread is simpler: It’s the kid’s face. The face of self-satisfaction and certitude, of edginess expressed as cruelty. The face remains almost completely still as his peers hoot in awed delight at his bravado. The face is both punchable and untouchable. Many observers recognized it right away."It wins." It. There is no person anymore. No "he," just an "it." There is no human, just an empty mask, as Ruth Graham sees it.
The face is in this photo of a clutch of white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s, and in many other images of jeering white men from that era. The face is the rows of Wisconsin high school boys flashing Nazi salutes in a prom picture last year. The face is Brett Kavanaugh—then a student at an all-boys Catholic prep school—“drunkenly laughing” as he allegedly held down Christine Blasey Ford. Anyone who knew the popular white boys in high school recognized it: the confident gaze, the eyes twinkling with menace, the smirk. The face of a boy who is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is exactly as powerful. The face that sneers, “What? I’m just standing here,” if you flinch or cry or lash out. The face knows that no matter how you react, it wins.
Looking into her mind, I think — and I show myself in saying this — that she believes she is and loves herself as a person of great empathy for human beings, and she is simply oblivious to the humanity of the teenager who she fears is harassing and mocking a person who looks to her like the kind of person she thinks of as Victim. She doesn't realize that she, a good person, could engage in victimizing, and when she looks in the mirror and smiles at herself, the expression on her face is never a "smirk."
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233 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 233 of 233MikeR said...
Yellow vests. Right now, decent people should be demanding the jobs of every columnist who (a) said vicious things about these kids, and (b) did not retract and apologize. Enough is enough.
Yellow vests. Right now, decent people should be demanding the jobs of every columnist who said vicious things about these kids. Enough is enough.
FIFY
PMJ is nemesis to Oops I crapped my pants and Pee tape. Just scroll past like most people do with Pee Pee. Its not that hard although PMJ is at least lucid.
Royal ass Inga: "Over the top nonsense by both sides."
I'm always amused by someone who claimed the religious right wants to literally create the Handmaid's Tale in America criticizing others for being "over the top".
I jumped out to read the Slate article and notice you have to hunt around for it now. The comments section has turned to almost 6:1 against it with the vitriol against the kids being dialed waaaaaaay down.
That young man learned a lesson that took me 50+ years. It will serve him well, saving him from the tendency to be a liberal in one's youth.
On both sides?
Bullshit.
This was a 100% leftwing smear job.
Just like the Rugby team, isn't it. That kid has got the stones! Kudos to his parents. The Diocese is drooling all over themselves in apology for the kid's "harassment", so the character models gotta be his folks.
Just how long do you think the rest of us are just going to sit back and keep taking this shit from thugs like you, Inga?
We've been taking it for most of the last fifty years.....
If only we had President Elizabeth Warren to spirit guide us through this difficult time.
Leftists are vile disgusting Nazi creatures.
from Insty:
Anti-Christian Ideology Is an Emerging Aspect of White “Progressive” Populism.
Who can forget the avatar of progressive populism himself, Bernie Sanders, in 2017 aggressively grilling a nominee for the Office of Management and Budget over his theological views on the differences between the Christian and Muslim faith? He actually said that the nominee was “not someone who this country is supposed to be about.” And of course Dianne Feinstein famously rebuked Trump judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett by declaring that the “dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s a concern.”
This week, in response to my defense of Christian education (I attended a Christian college, sent my three kids to a Christian school, and served as the chairman of the school board of their school), an activist started an “Expose Christian Schools” hashtag designed to elicit stories of the terrible things Christian educators do.
As Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire notes, “The Left spent much of last week attacking Karen Pence because she got a job at a Christian school that follows Christian teaching. By the end of the week, #ExposeChristianSchools was trending on Twitter. Then, on Saturday, a false narrative was quickly constructed claiming that a group of students from a Catholic school harassed and taunted a Native American man. I do not think that these events came together coincidentally…The Left hasn’t gone to the trouble of painting Christian schools as dangerous hate factories for no reason. They intend to do something with the fruits of their labor. What that is, exactly, will become clearer very soon.”
Leftists hate anything and anyone who refuse to worship the holy cult of the leftwing asshole.
Dianne Feinstein and Meryl Streep head that church.
F Bernie Sanders. Government whore.
John Hinderocker:
So, what has happened since? The Associated Press has refused to correct its lies. Liberals have threatened the families of the kids from Covington Catholic with death. Liberals have written to colleges, urging them to reject any applications from Covington Catholic students. Liberals have explicitly urged that the lives of the kids who innocently attended the March For Life be destroyed. Twitter has had no problem with tweets calling for violence, as long as the violence is directed against conservative teenagers.
Where do you go when the whole world seems to be against you? You hire a lawyer. Which is what some of the Covington kids’ families reportedly have done. For whatever reason, intolerant liberals on Twitter are frantically deleting tweets denouncing the innocent Covington kids, and in some cases calling for violence against them. Maybe they are just embarrassed at being caught red-handed, lying and purveying hate. But when has that ever embarrassed a liberal?
There is some evidence that the scrambling is due to the threat of litigation.
Bring it.
You people have time for this silly episode? As the World Turns: calling Dr Bob, stat
Ah..it crashed and and burned..so Howie calls it "silly".
Emily Litella approves.
Blogger Ty said...
If only we had President Elizabeth Warren to spirit guide us through this difficult time.
--
She could have brought everyone together with some Pow Wow Chow.
Though the Black Hebrew Idiot-lights would probably do something vile to it.
Well I prefer my Pow Wow Chow with crushed crackers on it.
I hope a huge Go Fund Me is created for these maligned teens.
F the left.
"Video evidence and statements from multiple witnesses indicate that the boys were targeted by two groups of protesters who hurled hateful, racial, homophobic slurs at them while they waited on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for their bus after participating in the March for Life."
Disney guy wants you in a woodchipper
Whenever evil vile leftwingers get caught with their hands in their Nazi fascist pants, they say 'Oh I was only joking!
Film producer Jack Morrissey apologized Monday for joking about “MAGA kids” going “screaming, hats first into the woodchipper.” <
“It was something that I did not give any thought to,” Morrissey told TheWrap. “It was just a fast, profoundly stupid tweet. … I would throw my phone into the ocean before doing that again.”
(Because he got owned)
He was just kid-ding.
Emily Litella doesn't have enough thumbs.
Apology..sorta:
A GQ writer says he regrets a now-deleted tweet in which he called for doxxing the Covington Catholic High School students involved in a confrontation with a Native American elder.
In a statement to TheWrap, GQ’s Nathaniel Friedman wrote:
It was an irresponsible and stupid tweet that happened in the heat of the moment because I was upset. It partly came from having been doxxed by MAGA people myself but that’s no excuse and no one should wish that on anybody else. It’s counterproductive to say anything along those lines and if you make yourself look like an irrational, mean idiot you’re playing right into their hands.
Howard said...
“You people have time for this silly episode? As the World Turns: calling Dr Bob, stat“
You and your leftist friends threatened to kill a kid.
You are trying to ruin his life.
They are threatening to burn the school down with the kids inside.
They want to punch the kids in the face.
Yeah. We have time for you and your piece of shit bigot allies.
Enough is enough. It is time to start treating you like you have been treating us.
Even a tape worm will avoid the scalpel if stabbed in the head enough. Hope the Covington parents sue the shit out of these monsters and make the rubble bounce.
Steve Uhr is strangely silent.
Agreed. I want lawsuits galore.
Alyssa Milano
Verified account @Alyssa_Milano
Jan 20
The red MAGA hat is the new white hood.
Without white boys being able to empathize with other people, humanity will continue to destroy itself.
#FirstThoughtsWhenIWakeUp
Doesn't look she's had a second thought on it.
Lefty Babe privilege..
"If that man shoved a drum in my face like that, I would not have smiled I would have told him to shove off."
And conservatives will continue to have drums shoved into their faces until they learn to respond with something more than a strongly worded memo.
Inga: "Over the top nonsense by both sides."
Funny. Thats what your daughter asked of my crew last night.
Except she was delightful.
Alysa Milano is a moron.
"The face is Brett Kavanaugh—then a student at an all-boys Catholic prep school—“drunkenly laughing” as he allegedly held down Christine Blasey Ford. Anyone who knew the popular white boys in high school recognized it: the confident gaze, the eyes twinkling with menace, the smirk. The face of a boy who is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is exactly as powerful."
The crude link back of this fake news to an earlier item of fake news cannot be understood with the insertion of the word "allegedly" into the sentence: who was in who's face has been distorted by the media, as has the meaning of the boy's smile, but the smile is there (whatever you make of it) yet a similar expression projected onto the youthful Brett Kavanugh would only have been there if he had actually held down Dr Fraud. Does the writer somehow think "allegedly" inoculates the piece against being libellous of Brett Kavanugh?
The leftwing Brownshirt left. That's who these assholes are. Brownshrits.
lesson from Ali Baba and forty Journalistos tweetering
---The "thief of Freedom" marks Ali Baba's door with a symbol so the other thieves can come back that night and kill everyone in the house. However, the "thief" has been seen by Morgiana TRUMP who, loyal to her master - the Constitution - , foils the thief's plan by marking all the houses in the neighborhood similarly by hanging MAGA hats on the door handles.
Loath as many seem to be --- more people need to start wearing MAGA hats as CIVIL protest.
set aside a day a week for it or some such or Do a rolling tide around the country - dare social media platforms and MSM to censor invites to participate -
MAGA hats >>>> Gilets Jaunes
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