Frown.

In making one of my occasional visits to Lynne Murphy’s blog Separated by a Common Language, I was directed to a decade-old post on frowns that begins: A 2010 blog post from the Prosody Lab at McGill University was pointed in my direction last week, and judging by the reaction when I tweeted it, I’m not the only one who was surprised by the should-be-evident-but-nearly-invisible difference between British and American it reported. The post is by a non-native speaker of English, ‘chael’ (who I assume is Michael Wagner, the lab director) […] The 2010 post quotes a friend’s question “Do you think this is a frown or a moustache?” and a dictionary definition of frown, “a wrinkling of the brow in displeasure or concentration,” and says “When I expressed my puzzlement, I learned that frown, in fact, also means the opposite of smile: a downward facing mouth expressing sadness, and that this is in fact the most common/salient meaning of the word, at least to some.” Lynne then continues: The…

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