What is a smile anyways?

Today, I was confronted with a smile.  If you can call it that.  The teeth were showing.  The corners of the mouth turned up pleasantly.  Overall, the face looked pleased...ish.

But it didn't feel like a smile.  Not a true one.

It was just an action--an action that was supposed to mean something, but it didn't.  Not to me.  I didn't feel sincerity in that smile.  In it, I perceived a need to seem pleasant, and a wish for a good-natured interaction, but I felt nothing of the genuine cheer that should accompany such an expression.

I was stunned.  This smile made me cock my head to one side, not smile back.  I forced myself to make an answering smile--realizing as I did so that I was mirroring the expression that had perplexed me in the first place.  Why did it bug me so much?  This wasn't a smile.  What makes a smile anyways?

Being in English 218R - Creative Writing, I did what I have been trained to do.  I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary.  (I'll be honest, I was excited.  The OED gives the etymology of words as well as the definition so you can see  what a word meant centuries ago and discover how it has changed.  Exciting, eh?  I think so.)  :)  (P.S. I promise that smile was legit.)

According to the OED a smile is:

"An act of smiling; a slight and more or less involuntary movement of the countenance expressive of pleasure, amusement, affection, etc., or of amused contempt, disdain, incredulity, or similar emotion..."
"smile, n.1". OED Online. June 2011. Oxford University Press. 6 September 2011 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/182595?rskey=Yy3QQf&result=1&isAdvanced=false>

So what was wrong with this smile I'd encountered?  Was it an expression of pleasure? No. Amusement? Hardly.  Affection?  Definitely not.  We weren't acquaintances like that.  None of those, but it wasn't amused contempt or any of the others either.  This smile was not involuntary in any way.  It seemed forced.  Habitual.

Now I'm not saying smiling a lot is a bad thing.  I love to smile and see smiles because they remind me that I should be wearing one.  Often, as soon as I see one, it somehow elicits an answering grin from my own features.  It's a simple way to make someone's day, and if you haven't noticed, I seem to be bound to type a smiley face whenever what I'm writing makes me smile. (Hence the overload of emoticons.)  What I'm saying is this:  If you don't mean the smile at all, why would you give it?  If that is the case, it is, by definition, not a smile at all.

Too often, we use the kind of 'smile' that fades as soon as we turn away from the subject it was meant for.  Too often, we use the 'courtesy smile' that really has no meaning.  If it lapses into a frown, it's not a real smile.  And I guess it's okay that we have fake ones.  After all, we don't want to be straight-faced all the time.  All that I ask is that you don't let that become your default smile.  Make sure that, when the time comes, you have a ready, genuine, fantastic smile on call and ready to go.  You don't want to be known for a fake one, do you?

A real, true, honest-to-gosh smile is so much more than an action of your mouth.  Sure, that's where most of us look, but a real smile can be seen in all of you.  Your eyes join in and get squinty and sparkly.  Your face smiles, you stand a little taller, you take in a short breath, and you can feel the smile work its way from your face, through your body, clear down to your toes.  It's a real smile when your whole self is required to display the happiness you feel inside.  It's a real smile, when your body is just an outward expression of a grinning spirit.

A real smile doesn't just disappear.  It lingers.  Evidence of a true smile will display itself in your eyes, face, and heart for a while after.  A real smile changes you.

So go out and smile at someone for reals. :D