Revealingly, it was at much the same moment that the smile entered the Western art tradition, in the form of the famous ‘smiling angel’, created between 12, that adorns the west front of the great cathedral in Reims in northeastern France. English finally got its ‘smile’ from a High German or Scandinavian source. A specific word for ‘smile’ emerged in Celtic and Slavic languages around then too, but using a non-Latinate term: the Danes got smile and the Swedes, smila. Around 1300, for example, French contained words for laughing ( rire) and laughter ( le rire or le ris ) and smile ( sourire, from sous-rire).Īt roughly the same times and in a similar manner, Italian adopted ridere and sorridere, Spanish reir and sonreir, Portuguese rir and sorrir, and Provençal rire and sobsrire. It retained this lesser status and this diminutive form, distinguishing it from the laugh as it entered the Romance languages in the High Middle Ages.
This came with the derived noun sub-risus (later, surrisus) a ‘sub-laugh’– a little or low laugh – associated with mockery. Only towards the end of the Roman Empire did a diminutive – subridere – enter the language. If we take their vocabulary at face value, they did not distinguish between a smile and a laugh, contenting themselves with a single Latin verb – ridere – for both. Courtesy the Getty Museum, LAĪncient Romans showed another variant. The archaic smile of the kouros ( c530 BCE, or modern forgery). In other words, the smile existed, but we don’t know what it meant. It may just be intended to evoke general health and contentment. Yet classicists are sceptical that this does in fact represent the expression as we know it. In the ‘archaic smile’ that is seen in certain ancient Greek sculptures, for example, the lips are formed into a smile. Yet the smile shows chronological as well as spatial differentiation. In the West, we tend to acknowledge the variability of codes in terms of space and diversity: there is a sense that Western smiling culture differs from that to be found, for example, in Japanese and Chinese societies. And these, of course, can differ very markedly. For a wink to be understood as a wink rather than a blink, winker and winked-at need to understand the cultural codes in play. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out in 1973, the wink is physiologically identical to the involuntary eyelid twitch we call a blink. The expression needs untangling, deciphering, decoding.
The ubiquity and polyvalence of the smile means that, in social circumstances, for example, it is not enough to see someone smiling. In order to access it, we need first to take on board more general cultural factors. In fact, the smile has a fascinating, if much-neglected past. It seems only one step further to claim that the smile has no history. The smile has always been with us then, and it would appear it’s always been the same. From The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) by Charles Darwin. He also showed that the great apes’ smile has something of the gesture’s polyvalence among humans: it can denote pleasure (notably under tickling) but also aggressive self-defence. It was Charles Darwin, in his classic The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), who gave the first scientific demonstration of a great ape smiling. Many great apes are known to produce them, suggesting that the smile first appeared on the face of a common ancestor well before the existence of Homo sapiens. The smile may even predate the human species. The facial muscles required to smile are in fact present in the womb, ready for early deployment to anxious parents. It may denote sensory pleasure and delight, gaiety and amusement, satisfaction, contentment, affection, seduction, relief, stress, nervousness, annoyance, anger, shame, aggression, fear and contempt.
As well as being easy to make and to recognise, the smile is also highly versatile. The smile needs only a single muscle to produce: the zygomaticus major at the corner of the mouth (though a simultaneous twitching of the eyelid’s orbicularis oculi muscle is required for a sincere and joyful smile). Other facial expressions denoting emotion – such as fear, anger or distress – require up to four muscles.
It is also an easier expression to make than most others. The smile is the most easily recognised facial expression at a distance in human interactions.
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