"Smirk"

'Smirk' is one of the great concept of the English language, and that has only come clear to me when Bush became president. Unfortunately, the word has no real equivalent in French.

It can be defined as

'To smile in an affected, often offensively self-satisfied manner'

It has been translated into French by [Harrap's Dictionary] as 'sourire d'un air narquois' but the English word has more to it than this translation reveals.

As an example, think of President Bush who is always smirking when he gives a speech. He did it again yesterday when he spoke in Brussels. It is sort of ain't-that-good or an ain't-that-a-great-statement movement of the face. Or it may be that he is simply happy and proud to have made a complete sentence with a subject, a verb, and a complement, with some actual sense to it. It is like 'Hey, look, I made it".

Apparenlty, his 'smirk' has been noticed for a long time. Brian Williams and the Boston Globe's David Nyhan noted the Smirk Problem on MSNBC and CNN, respectively, prompting a superbly detailed article by the Wall Street Journal's Jackie Calmes.

One of the suggestions is the daring idea that Bush's smirks may be "masking" smiles intended to hide some other emotion… or some other agenda.

No way! Is this actually suggesting that a president could actually…. LIE? I dare not even consider it.

Yet, that would give a whole new light to Bush's recent speech about the importance of Europe and France to his policy.