#6157
#8
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002
From: Laura Belin <belinlaura@yahoo.com>
Subject: smiling in Russia
Stephen Dalziel's piece "In search of a Russian smile" (JRL 6152) reminded me of a game show I saw on Russian television around 1996. It was the equivalent of the American show "Family Feud," where teams try to guess the most common answers that 100 respondents gave to various questions. One of the questions was something like "What kind of person smiles a lot?" or "What kind of person is always smiling?"
I don't know what answers a random group of Americans would give to this question: optimist? sales rep?
I'm pretty sure, though, that they would be different from the top three answers on the Russian program I watched:
1. lucky person ("schastlivets")
2. idiot
3. American
It stuck in my mind, since several Russians had told me over the years that they could spot Americans walking down the street because they were the ones smiling for no reason. Like Dalziel observed, even though we think of smiling as a universal gesture, it can mean different things in different cultures.
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