“Where is a frown?” Americans say mouth, Brits say forehead (my mind=blown)

allthingslinguistic:

superlinguo:

This recent post from Lynne Murphy on Separated By a Common Language created much discussion in my Twitter feed and over dinner with a collection of American, British and Australian English speakers. Many of us have been living with semantic variation staring up in the face. Even (American English) Lynne didn’t realise her (British English) husband had a difference sense from her:

When I tweeted the question “Where is a frown?” British people told me
“on the forehead”. When I asked the Englishman in my house, he said the
same thing. Fourteen years together and only now do I know that he’s
been frowning much of the time.

And like one of the blog commenters, the Brits I talked with had an epiphany: so that’s why Americans say “turn your frown upside down!” to mean ‘cheer up!’.

Older Australian English speakers I talked to identified the forehead frown as the sense that they have, but a frown has always been the opposite of a smile for me, all about the mouth. Otherwise, what is the opposite of a smile? It looks like we have some intergenerational semantic shift happening right under our noses.

See Lynne’s original post on Separated by a Common Language.

I’m Canadian and I also have the mouth meaning for frown (as it seems do Canadians in general per Michael Wagner’s post), so I’ve come to an epiphany of my own: this must be the origin of the expression “it takes [large number] of muscles to frown, but only [small number] of muscles to smile.” Curving your lips down doesn’t feel like it takes that many muscles, but furrowing your brow definitely does.