‘That’s not a facepalm,’ said my husband. ‘It’s a headslap.’ He proved the point by making contact between the flat of his hand and his noble brow, producing a percussive sound. Then he covered his eyes with outstretched fingers and said: ‘That’s a facepalm.’
He was right to make a semantic distinction between these two non-verbal gestures. The headslap signifies usually comic frustration at another’s stupidity. The facepalm conveys embarrassment.
The names are recent. Facepalm is not found earlier than 1996 in the Oxford English Dictionary. Those who like to employ emojis (which I do not) will find one for the job. The headslap has not yet been noticed by the OED.
The gesture of Cain in the statue of him in the Tuileries by Henri Vidal is not an example of a facepalm, nor is that of Adam in the painting by Masaccio in Florence of the expulsion from Eden. If you can’t tell the difference between embarrassment and anguished remorse, you should go back to emoji school.
Either facepalm or headslap may be accompanied by the interjection doh, which was included in the OED in 2001. It expresses ‘frustration at the realisation that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish. Also implying that another person has said or done something foolish’.
The first citation is from ITMA (It’s That Man Again), in 1945, in a piece of dialogue between Tommy Handley and Miss Hotchkiss. It was followed up with a strained pun on doh and doe (a deer). The dictionary also lists duh as a separate word, first found in 1943. But doh or perhaps dooh had already become a catchphrase of James Finlayson, who played in 33 Laurel and Hardy films. He first exclaimed ‘Doh!’ pretty well as soon as the talkies would allow him, on 29 June 1929. I shall set my husband to looking through his films to find the earliest doh paired with a headslap.
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