po-faced
adjective (chiefly British)

- a po-faced person has a face with a serious, disapproving, or empty expression

- having an assumed solemn, serious, or earnest expression or manner: piously or hypocritically solemn

The Cambridge Dictionary / Merriam-Webster

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PHRASE ORIGIN

“Po-faced” is actually quite a modern word, first recorded only in 1934 in the book Music Ho! by Constant Lambert, a British music critic and composer. Although its origin is uncertain, different theories have been put forward:

- “Po” – abbreviated French pot de chambre “chamber pot”, after the distasteful expression anyone would adopt upon being presented with a full one.

- “Pooh” – an interjection used to express contempt or disapproval.

- “Poker-faced” – without any expression.


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PO-FACED IN GENEVA

At an international conference in Geneva in 1956 the then Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, asked Lord Gladwyn to lend some of the magnificent silver from the British Embassy in Paris, so that he could welcome his fellow ministers in style.

Sitting next to the sullen Soviet Foreign Minister (Vyacheslav Molotov) at Macmillan’s dinner party, Gladwyn asked him whether he did not admire the silver plate and the great candelabra by which the room was lit. “In Moscow,” Molotov replied, “we have electric light.”

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SYNONYMS

- wearing a particularly stern and disapproving expression:

almighty, austere, blank, bookish, businesslike, cheerless, chill, clinical, cold, comfortless, curt, deadpan, discourteous, dispassionate, dour, expressionless, flinty, funereal, glum, grim, grim-faced, hard-nosed, humourless, icy, impassive, impersonal, implacable, impolite, inexpressive, inscrutable, insensible, joyless, leaden, mirthless, miserable, morbid, morose, no-nonsense, nobody home, no joke, no laughing matter, old-maidish, owlish, PO-FACED, poker-faced, priggish, prim and proper, restrained, rigid, schoolmarmish, schoolmistressy, serious, severe, solemn, sombre, sourpuss, staid, starchy, stiff, stolid, stone-faced, stony, straight-faced, straightlaced, strict, strictly business, stuffy, sullen, sunless, surly, unamused, unemotional, unexpressive, unhumorous, unsmiling, unwelcoming, vacant, wintrey, with a long face, woeful, wooden

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

“One doesn’t want to be unkind, but it’s really hard to give tips to PO-FACED waiters.”

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