Link to Staff Report: Straight Dope Staff Report: Why do photographers ask you to say “cheese”?Well, things have certainly changed since I was here a few years ago. I won’t be paying a fee as it is just too hard to get the money to people from Lithuania. The transfer fees will cost more than the subscription.
Consequently this might be the wrong thread but I cannot find the one for today’s staff comment about ‘say cheese’. So if someone could direct this in the right direction, it would be appreciated.
Many years ago, someone posed exactly this question to me and I turned to the OED (unabridged Oxford English Dictionary) for my answer. As far as I could piece together from the entries under cheese (My dictionary is buried at the moment or I would be more specific.) ‘cheese’ started as refering, among other things, to a round or wheel of cheese. Then it started to be taken metaphorically to mean the result of a girl’s game of spinning around quickly so one’s skirt billowed out and then sitting down ‘to make a cheese’. From this childhood game then developed making a circle with your face by smiling. And so in school slang we have ‘cheese’ meaning smile. This was around the time when photography was beginning and it would stand to reason that photographers would use children’s slang to get them to smile, not that I have seen too many photos of anyone smiling back then. On the other hand, I have no idea when this term fell out of usage.
My father in law is a professional photographer, and ‘cheese’ happens to make the face move like it is smiling. If you draw out a smile, you can snap a picture of the stupid kid and get paid…simple as that [it helps that ‘cheese’ is sort of a rediculous word to say out of context and kids like being absurd whenever possible.]
[and cut the cheese in the US means to fart, ‘make the cheese’ must be lithuanian as I have never heard it used, and I have lived all over the country]
Abakan, I sort of assume that an electronic payment, by credit card or PayPal, wouldn’t involve a transfer fee? You might check on that, we’d be delighted to have you as a member. Alternately, there might be some way for someone in the States to cover the fees and you arrange to pay them back on the side somehow. Check: Make your “pay my subscription fee” request here
Also, I have edited in a link to the Staff Report under discussion, which actually won’t be posted until next Tuesday (Sept 20).
Hello,
Unfortunately when I hit reply, the original messages disappear, making it hard to answer specific people.
As to ‘make a cheese’, that would be British English, not American. I grew up in the States and also never heard the expression.
As to getting kids to smile, our school photographer used ‘sex’, which is new and risque. Needless to say, everyone gave him a very wide smile. That someone would choose a word solely on the basis of a vowel sound seems a bit far fetched to me. Also Ameicans tend to skeak from their throat, making it entirely possible and likely that I will pronounce ‘cheese’ without moving my lips much at all. Perhaps in British English where words are pronounced on the tip of the tongue, a person would naturally smile.
As to dues, Paypal rejected my debit card (Maestro) when I tried to use their service about 6 months ago. I have no idea why. I have not maintained ties with people in the States and those I have do not use credit cards.
Also I don’t have a lot of time to do much posting. Right now I am working on a nasty little history text about the condomium (one land, two governments, not the building thing) in Ukraine that a client gave me a while back without specifying a due date and then called last monday and said he needed it that day. I am now four days behind and counting… So I would be inclined to use your service only if it was free. Otherwise the return would be insufficient.
Incidently, your site apparently rejected my email address because it ends in .net as I tried several of mine. It was a good thing I had a gmail address for emergencies.
And last, thank you for linking this thread to the proper site.
Well, I had to find my OED afterall. I couldn’t find my word I needed but I did look ‘cheese’ up again.
Definition no 3 is to make cheeses [F. faire des fromages] …dates for the quotes are 1835-1881
5b applied to various objects shaped like cheese: see quots 1859-1963 but nothing relevant to faces or smiles
1e school slang A smile. also esp photographer’s colloq., the word ‘cheese’ notionally or actually pronounced to form the lips into a smiling expression
quots are from 1930, 1956, and 1964
cheese v., rare def. 2 school slang To smile
1930 Another slang use of the word ‘cheese’ was in vogue at Rugby School… This was with the meaning ‘smile’ both verb and noun.
1940 M. Marples Public School Slang p. 40 cheese…to smile or grin (Oudle 1930+)
AT least you can now see the facts on which I based my conclusions. I thought I also saw somewhere in all the quotes why a smile was called a cheese but don’t see it now. As I remember it, the eyebrows and lips form a circle or cheese when one smiles.
In Norway, the most common thing to say is ‘si ‘smil’’ (say ‘smile’) - considering ‘smil’ is pronounced smeel, it has the same ee sound found in e.g. cheese. However, there are also some who say ‘si ‘ost’’ (say cheese), referencing to the English expression.
I forgot about posting what Lithuanians say, which is the mundane ‘shipsokites’, accent on the ‘so’ with the i’s short and the e short and pronounced. Sorry, no long e sounds in the word. It is just the plural imperative form of ‘shipsotis’ ‘to smile’. We have a language commission here that strictly regulates the language so there is very little metaphorical or obscure usage in the language at present.
That’s part of it, of course, as well as the shape of the face when making the sound ee. In Egypt many years ago, we got children to smile for the camera by saying “gibnah”, which is Arabic for cheese. It doesn’t have the right sound at all, but it’s so silly that it worked a treat!
I’m having trouble finding a cite for this, but I’ve often heard that early portraits don’t show people smiling because of the length of exposure times. (IANAP, so I hope I phrased that correctly.) People had to hold still and it’s easier to hold a neutral face than to hold a smile.
Assuming that’s true, and having no knowledge about when advances in photography allowed for smiling faces, I would question the idea of children’s slang influencing photography and wonder whether the Rugby school slang in the 30’s et al. could have come from photographic tradition instead of vice versa.
Ok, derrogue-types did indeed take a long posing time and they set the stage for later practices. The post you quoted was before I found my OED and refreshed my memory so I did confuse the time frame in that initial post. Osa Johnson (If I have her name wrong, I think one of her books is I Married Adventure) married a photographer back in the twenties I believe. (I have a couple of her books but also buried deeper than the OED.) He was one of the first ones to try to get people to smile and look natural in photographs. So by that time, the technology had improved enough to make this possible. And in the 30’s I believe you do see class pictures whereas derrogue-types for 50+ years prior are usually of adults.
But a stronger argument comes from the OED. I copied the entry as is, i.e. school slang is listed first and the photography reference follows in the same entry. I am sure they would have reversed the order if the primary source were photography.
Hope that clears the issue up a little since apparently I was a little vague.
Well, figured out how to use this bit of technology.
I do not understand what ‘this’ refers to. If you mean the interpolation from children’s game to slang for smile, the more I think about it, the more I think I made that leap 6 years ago when I first answered the question. The quote I gave from the OED is the basis for that interpolation in that it shows children did use cheese metaphorically as did adults to mean something round. And it states that cheese was school slang for smile or grin some 50 years after the game is mentioned. I would guess that it would hard to find more than speculation on the matter since the OED did not include it. I imagine they would have included such a quote if it had existed at that time.
The rest comes from the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition I believe) under ‘cheese’
Recently, having my photo taken with a group of Spanish speakers in Edinburgh, I noticed that they all said ‘Patate’ before the click. I assume it’s the ‘ay’ sound at the end that does it.
Remove the initial clause the comma and the ‘but’…
After a brief tutorial on using this bit of technology, I found an etymology dictionary (you’ll need to scroll down to find cheese) that says, in part:
emphasis mine
Another photography reference on the same site is:
Speculation does describe your leap! I don’t see how the childhood game which led to the figurative use of ‘cheese’ to mean a deep curtsey then led to the word meaning to grin or smile. I tried to find the connection in your posting from the OED, but I don’t see it. I went to OED online, but you have to pay for it and SDMB fees have tapped me.
Seems to me that in Mexico, “whiskey” is pretty much universal. Hmmm… don’t know how to spell that in Spanish (they seem to transliterate everything, like jonron for homerun, so I imagine they do the same for “whiskey.”
In Brazil, they say the Portuguese name for the letter X, spelled xis and pronounced “sheess.” Sounds almost exactly like “cheese,” but nothing like the Portuguese word for “cheese,” which is queijo.
You’re supposed to exaggerate each of the three ah sounds and pronounce the whole thing opening the sides of your mouth as much as possible, which combines with the silliness of saying “potato” and may actually make you smile.
Some people say whiskey. I have a friend who says bacalao, “cod”: it also has the ah sounds and my friend enjoys the looks he occasionally gets from people who hadn’t previously met his sense of humor.
Ok, what I didn’t copy was from my OED (paper version) was all the quotes from the entry on ‘cheese’ used metaphorically. From these one can see that the people in the UK liked to call things that were shaped like a disc especially, but also round ‘cheese’. A girl’s outspread dress is just such an example. Most people think of a smile as an arc, not a circle but if you look in an elementary book on drawing, you will find that among other things, the eyebrows are involved in a really big smile or laugh and form other arcs of the same circle. The only alternative etymology would be that the lips are the rind and the teeth the cheese but since they do not form a circle, just an arc and there is no hint that people thought of ‘cheese’ as anything other than a circle, this is less likely. There is also no entry showing it to be used metaphorically otherwise than as a circle or disc. Last one has Cockney rhyming slang but you need a related word that rhymes with ‘cheese’ and the closest I can think of is ‘teeth’, which I do not think would be considered close enough from the examples of rhyming slang I have seen. It is also odd that a Cockney word that gained wide acceptance would not be included in most Cockney dictionaries.
As to the ee vowel sound, ‘sweets’, the British word for candy, has the same vowel sound as ‘cheese’ and would be much more attractive for children than cheese. Therefore if the vowel was the crux of the matter, I think ‘sweets’ would beat out ‘cheese’.
