Face is an integral part of many Asian societies, including China, Korea and Japan. Although the concept of face is extremely complex, it can be diluted down into the meaning of respect and dignity. Face can sometimes be intepreted as your ability to face society. If you "lose face", you are shamed and cannot face others. Hence a sign of shame in Chinese society is hanging your head in shame. You cannot look others in the eye, hence you lose "face".

It is too complicated to explain on paper. If you haven't lived in Asian society for long periods of time it is unlikely that you will understand the concept. But I will try to put it in simple terms.

Respect and dignity is an extremely important thing in Asia, especially for a man. Some people are willing to lie to "save face". For example, if the truth is ugly, most people in Asia will tell people what they want to hear instead of the truth to "save face" for themselves. Such as a travel agency telling me my flight was delayed for an hour when it has really been cancelled altogether. In this way, they attempted to please me and save face, because they would be shamed if they directly informed me of their failure. However, having lived in Asia, I know better than to believe their lies and demanded a refund and booked a new flight right away.

In addition, among other things, to hide shame, people resort to many things, including humor. Smiling is actually a sign of embarassment in Asia. I have seen a white man in a hotel screaming for service in English and the confused hotel clerk smiling from ear-to-ear. It is hilarious. By grinning they hope to save some face. I don't know how.

Anyways, the concept of face is part of Asian society. For people that lived here it and the resulting deception is expected, however, for foreigners it can be very infuriating. The incentive to deceive others to save their own asses is quite understandable, but in Asia it is carried out to an exceptional degree of subtlety due to the importance of dignity here. Face is one of the more interesting peculiarities in Asia, IMO.

Part of the elite fighting force known as the A-Team. Face, or Faceman, is the nickname for Lt. Templeton Peck (played by Dirk Benedict). He is the con man, ladies man, scavenger of the team. When they need something face is sent to con his way into possession of the item. His weakness is women, he can't resist a pretty girl. Also he often has pretty nice cars that always seem to get left behind, yet he manages to get it back some how or replace it easily enough (one assumes through conning).

dang, i totally put this in the wrong node originally. remember kids make sure you are where you think you are.

Short for babyface, the insider term for a "good guy" in professional wrestling. Faces normally exclusively fight heels, who are the bad guys. Faces normally don't cheat or do bad things, but the line between face and heel is becoming increasingly blurred.

The following is pure fiction; actually, I have been handsome and popular all my life.

There has always been something wrong with my face.

"Look in the mirror, Stevie," My mother said, holding me up so that I can see my face. "See, there's Stevie."

The little ears stuck out. That was the first thing I noticed. Two ears. And though the hair was pasted down suave, and brushed neatly into a regular boys hairdo, a few stringy locks had popped loose. Curly hair. Ahh.

The nose was a pale blob of cold putty. Had the police already gotten to me? No, I was born like that. At two, my face already looked like the face of a convict. But the eyes and chin were pretty. Pretty.

When I was four, I got polio. I was paralyzed from the neck down. I could barely turn my head. My flesh withered. I didn't see my face again until I was five and a half. The cheeks had collapsed. A young death's head. Taut, bony, unlined forehead, the chin had turned hard like a frozen lily. The eyes glowed the color of green figs. I opened my mouth. A blood-soaked bird's nest, in which the mother bird had been killed and her fetal offspring left to die in their unhatched eggs. A mouth full of meat and feathers and tiny white coffins. A fat pink worm snarled from the red gash in my face. I watched my tongue moving in the mirror, enthralled.

Red was my favorite color. I took a tube of my mother's red lipstick and made big red X's on all my dad's business stationary. My father hit my in the face, hard.

I always wanted a red face and black hair. Straight black hair, dark crimson face. Instead, I had curly mouse hair and bleached pink face. I thought of cutting my face up with a razor and pouring shoe polish on my head. Slicing off my ears. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror: the blood was a pathetic little dribble. I cried.

When I was six, I got glasses. The glasses' temples pushed my ears out even further and made them swell and blush a painful pink. Other kids made fun of me. I was the scrawniest kid in the whole school, too. I walked with my toes pointed in because of the polio, and I had to wear big bulbous orthopedic shoes. My face mirrored my self-consciousness and embarrassment, probably even in my sleep.

All through my school years, I was one of the ugly kids. My mother bought me a pair of stylish black horned rimmed glasses. They only enhanced my pallor. Other kids' faces turned brown in the summer. Mine looked like a cheap mask of blistered pink rubber from a joke shop.

In the fifth grade, I proposed to a girl named Denise Johnson out on the lunch court. White globs of seagull and pidgin shit rained from the sky. Denise said she wanted me to propose properly between the gym and cafeteria after school. I combed my "regular boys", and wiped my modern glasses. At ten after three, I met Denise between the two buildings. I was shivering and my mouth was dry and tasted horrible. I got down on my knees on the shit-splotched black top in front of Ms. Johnson. My mouth was just level with her groin. I looked up at her pretty brown face and long, straight, black hair, she looked down at my damp cheeks and smiled benign.

"Denise, you are the prettiest, smartest girl in the whole school. Will you marry me?" My insides chattered against each other as I spoke the words. My face was livid and silly. I could feel my eyeballs bulging in their bone-sockets. My knees ached.

"HAHAHA! You're too ugly. You look like you've been whopped with an ugly stick. Hahaha!" Her face had changed to a contemptuous snarl. Misty lavender donuts of shame appeared in front of my eyes. Suddenly, a mob of snickering boys and girls jumped out from around the back corner of the cafeteria. They surrounded us, laughing and jeering. I stood up, wobbling, a lump in my throat. My asshole pinched tight. Denise joined the circle of snapping, cruel children; she stood next to Rudy Stoltz, the handsomest, most popular guy in the school, they held hands.

"Fuck you, Jew ass burn-butt," said Rudy. I put my huge clumsy hands over my face. A cantaloupe skin hit me in the ear. I could hear the kids wandering away, giggling and guffawing. When I took my hands away from my face, I was alone. There was a thin white and green line of seagull shit on my tan jacket. I walked home through a network of alleys.

Finally, because of my face, I quit school in the eighth grade. I spent my days hiding out in the dark humid garage, doing chemistry experiments and writing in secret code. Sometimes I'd sneak out the side door, walk to the nearest storm drain opening, squeeze in, and crawl around in the complicated black maze of tunneling underneath Los Angeles.

There were rats and black widow spiders down there. I imagined myself dead from spider bites, my face being chewed off by rats. I derived a mysterious feeling of solace from this prospect. No one would ever find me down there, and even if they did, I wouldn't have a face anymore.

My mother to some psychiatrists. They agreed that I was a very disturbed young man. I had taken to wear a red-hooded sweatshirt with the drawstring on the hood pulled tight so there was just a little hole, like a squinched up anal sphincter muscle for me to peer out of. I wore a black Beatles wig over the red hood. I ate my meals alone in the garage. My mother would sometimes stand in the doorway crying. Finally, I threatened to cut her throat with a butcher knife and smear her blood all over my face if she didn't stay the fuck away from me. I poured a pint lacquer on my head, and had to have my scalp shaved. I hadn't bathed or changed clothes in months.

The doctors felt that I needed to be hospitalized. My mother signed some papers. There was a brief court hearing, during which I was declared insane and my custody handed over to the state of California. Nearly bald, laughing hysterically, and muttering. I was handcuffed and delivered by the sheriff's department to a gruesome state hospital in California's Citrus Valley. There I discovered there were people with far uglier faces than mine. Some of these people were so ghastly; I couldn't look at them without retching. After a few months, though, I got used to it.

Still, I couldn't make peace with my own dreadful visage. The doctors put me on medication, they talked to me. Nothing did any good.

Six months was the longest they could hold me legally. I was released and immediately hit the streets. I took up with faggot Dadaists who didn't believe in faces. I tried make-up. I tried turning into a woman. I straightened my hair and dyed it black and wore a monk's cowl so that all I could see was the sidewalk and no-one could see me at all.

I never returned home. Never went back to school. Never saw Denise Johnson or Rudy Stoltz again. Over the years, because of my face and my unfortunate attitude towards it, I have had to be institutionalized several times. I became a drug-addict, alcoholic, and criminal.

When I comb my hair, I wear a blank paper mask with eyeholes. I shave with an electric razor and no mirror like a blind man. You have seen more of me already than I will ever see of myself. I hope you aren't as alarmed or as offended by my face as I am.

"Look in the mirror, Stevie. See. There's Stevie."

I stand there sometimes in secret, looking. There will always be something wrong with my face.

-- Steven Jesse Bernstein's Prison Album. Punctuation is most definately incorrect, but I've never been able to find an actual book of his.

The intersection of a polytope with a tangent hyperplane; it is itself a polytope of some lower dimension. The 0-dimensional faces are called vertices, the 1-dimensional faces are called edges, the (d-2)-dimensional faces are called ridges, and the (d-1)-dimensional faces are called facets.

--back to combinatorics--

KANJI: GAN kao (face, expression)

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Character Etymology:

This character is the combination of two Chinese characters no longer in general use. The radical at left is a character which is a combination of three smaller radicals meaning (from top to bottom) attractive, cliff, and hair. Cliff is used to large to phonetically express forehead but it probably also is suggesting the brow itself. Thus the entire left side means something literally like, "attractive forehead," but has been generalized to just handsome.

The radical at right is from an old Chinese character meaning page, but in fact it is a pictograph of a standing man with an exaggerated head. It can still be found in Chinese to mean head.

The combination of the two radicals first meant handsome face, then just face.

A Listing of All On-Yomi and Kun-Yomi Readings:

on-yomi: GAN
kun-yomi: kao

English Definitions:

1. GAN, kanbase: face, countenance.
2. kao: face, countenance, expression; honor, prestige.

Character Index Numbers:

New Nelson: 6648
Henshall: 93

Unicode Encoded Version:

顔

Unicode Encoded Compound Examples:

顔面 (ganmen): the face.
顔色 (kaoiro): complexion.
顔が立つ (kao (ga) ta(tsu)): to save face.

 

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Face is a British action thriller from 1997. Directed by Antonia Bird, it shows us some faces, lower classes' workers who have turned into professional thieves. Think of The Full Monty meets Reservoir Dogs.

Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty, who also did Priest with Antonia Bird) is the most known actor in a truly excellent cast (besides Blur's Damon Albarn). All the characters are full of life and nuances not usually found in American action movies; there's even social stuff in the fine British tradition.

The action is also mean and intense. The opening heist is great, and the last scene is brilliant; starts as a break in and ends in a pumping shoot out. Some scenes reminded me of Heat.

The icing comes in the soundtrack; from the unmissable London Calling by The Clash to electronic beats (Fluke) that give the movie some oomph, and some really enjoyable ballads for the rest.

Anyway, it's just great to see a movie with guns and pubs. Got to see Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, natch.

The strictest meaning of face is the front part of the head of the human being – between the ears, below the hair or scalp, down to the neck.

Features of the face include the forehead, eyebrows, eyes, nose, cheeks, mouth, chin and any facial hair.

The face is the most easily recognisable part of a person, due to the large number of features and the variability of colour, placement and size of them. However this recognisability is due in no small part to the observer: we have parts of our brains dedicated solely to the task of recognising human faces.

Biologically, the face is a cluster of orifices and sense organs located conveniently near to the brain, and thoughtfully pointed in the direction that the face’s owner will be moving. Thus to change direction is to go about-face.

The face is the front of a person, literally and metaphorically. To change facing is to point in a different direction. To face up to a fact or to face the music is to stop ignoring (metaphorically looking away from) it.

The face can be considered as a cluster of input-output ports. Inputs are visual, audible, smell and taste data; food, water and air. And outputs are air, sound and facial expressions. The face is the primary body part used in human non-verbal communication.

The only other significant cluster of input-output ports on the human body is the groin. While the groin is universally considered the most private part of the body, the face is the most public. Only in very extreme conditions do fashions or climate dictate that the face must be covered, and likewise the groin will be the last part to be uncovered.

Face as a verb can also mean to turn or point towards, e.g. The TV faced towards the couch. Note that his implies that the TV has a face – i.e. the front working surface of an inanimate object is a metaphorical face.

A face (noun) can simply mean a flat surface, e.g. A cube has six faces, but a cliff only has one.

Face is often used as a translation for an eastern concept meaning something like Social standing, respect, dignity, honour, prestige or gravitas.

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Presenting the familiar in a novel writeup - to replace the short writeup that got nuked

Face (?), n. [F., from L. facies form, shape, face, perh. from facere to make (see Fact); or perh. orig. meaning appearance, and from a root meaning to shine, and akin to E. fancy. Cf. Facetious.]

1.

The exterior form or appearance of anything; that part which presents itself to the view; especially, the front or upper part or surface; that which particularly offers itself to the view of a spectator.

A mist . . . watered the whole face of the ground.
Gen. ii. 6.

Lake Leman wooes me with its crystal face.
Byron.

2.

That part of a body, having several sides, which may be seen from one point, or which is presented toward a certain direction; one of the bounding planes of a solid; as, a cube has six faces.

3. (Mach.)

(a)

The principal dressed surface of a plate, disk, or pulley; the principal flat surface of a part or object.

(b)

That part of the acting surface of a cog in a cog wheel, which projects beyond the pitch line.

(c)

The width of a pulley, or the length of a cog from end to end; as, a pulley or cog wheel of ten inches face.

4. (Print.)

(a)

The upper surface, or the character upon the surface, of a type, plate, etc.

(b)

The style or cut of a type or font of type.

5.

Outside appearance; surface show; look; external aspect, whether natural, assumed, or acquired.

To set a face upon their own malignant design.
Milton.

This would produce a new face of things in Europe.
Addison.

We wear a face of joy, because
We have been glad of yore.
Wordsworth.

6.

That part of the head, esp. of man, in which the eyes, cheeks, nose, and mouth are situated; visage; countenance.

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
Gen. iii. 19.

7.

Cast of features; expression of countenance; look; air; appearance.

We set the best faceon it we could.
Dryden.

8. (Astrol.)

Ten degrees in extent of a sign of the zodiac. Chaucer.

9.

Maintenance of the countenance free from abashment or confusion; confidence; boldness; shamelessness; effrontery.

This is the man that has the face to charge others with false citations.
Tillotson.

10.

Presence; sight; front; as in the phrases, before the face of, in the immediate presence of; in the face of, before, in, or against the front of; as, to fly in the face of danger; to the face of, directly to; from the face of, from the presence of.

11.

Mode of regard, whether favorable or unfavorable; favor or anger; mostly in Scriptural phrases.

The Lord make his face to shine upon thee.
Num. vi. 25.

My face [favor] will I turn also from them.
Ezek. vii. 22.

12. (Mining)

The end or wall of the tunnel, drift, or excavation, at which work is progressing or was last done.

13. (Com.)

The exact amount expressed on a bill, note, bond, or other mercantile paper, without any addition for interest or reduction for discount. McElrath.

⇒ Face is used either adjectively or as part of a compound; as, face guard or face-guard; face cloth; face plan or face-plan; face hammer.

Face ague (Med.), a form of neuralgia, characterized by acute lancinating pains returning at intervals, and by twinges in certain parts of the face, producing convulsive twitches in the corresponding muscles; -- called also tic douloureux. --
Face card, one of a pack of playing cards on which a human face is represented; the king, queen, or jack. --
Face cloth, a cloth laid over the face of a corpse. --
Face guard, a mask with windows for the eyes, worn by workman exposed to great heat, or to flying particles of metal, stone, etc., as in glass works, foundries, etc. --
Face hammer, a hammer having a flat face. --
Face joint (Arch.), a joint in the face of a wall or other structure. --
Face mite (Zoöll.), a small, elongated mite (Demdex folliculorum), parasitic in the hair follicles of the face. --
Face mold, the templet or pattern by which carpenters, ect., outline the forms which are to be cut out from boards, sheet metal, ect. --
Face plate.
(a) (Turning) A plate attached to the spindle of a lathe, to which the work to be turned may be attached.
(b) A covering plate for an object, to receive wear or shock.
(c) A true plane for testing a dressed surface. Knight. --
Face wheel. (Mach.)
(a) A crown wheel.
(b) A Wheel whose disk face is adapted for grinding and polishing; a lap.

Cylinder face (Steam Engine), the flat part of a steam cylinder on which a slide valve moves. --
Face of an anvil, its flat upper surface. --
Face of a bastion (Fort.), the part between the salient and the shoulder angle. --
Face of coal (Mining), the principal cleavage plane, at right angles to the stratification. --
Face of a gun, the surface of metal at the muzzle. --
Face of a place (Fort.), the front comprehended between the flanked angles of two neighboring bastions. Wilhelm. --
Face of a square (Mil.), one of the sides of a battalion when formed in a square. --
Face of a watch, clock, compass, card etc., the dial or graduated surface on which a pointer indicates the time of day, point of the compass, etc. --
Face to face.
(a) In the presence of each other; as, to bring the accuser and the accused face to face.
(b) Without the interposition of any body or substance. "Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face." 1 Cor. xiii. 12.

(c) With the faces or finished surfaces turned inward or toward one another; vis à vis; -- opposed to back to back. --
To fly in the face of, to defy; to brave; to withstand. --
To make a face, to distort the countenance; to make a grimace. Shak.

 

© Webster 1913

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Face (?), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Faced (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Facing (?).]

1.

To meet in front; to oppose with firmness; to resist, or to meet for the purpose of stopping or opposing; to confront; to encounter; as, to face an enemy in the field of battle.

I'll face
This tempest, and deserve the name of king.
Dryden.

2.

To Confront impudently; to bully.

I will neither be facednor braved.
Shak.

3.

To stand opposite to; to stand with the face or front toward; to front upon; as, the apartments of the general faced the park.

He gained also with his forces that part of Britain which faces Ireland.
Milton.

4.

To cover in front, for ornament, protection, etc.; to put a facing upon; as, a building faced with marble.

5.

To line near the edge, esp. with a different material; as, to face the front of a coat, or the bottom of a dress.

6.

To cover with better, or better appearing, material than the mass consists of, for purpose of deception, as the surface of a box of tea, a barrel of sugar, etc.

7. (Mach.)

To make the surface of (anything) flat or smooth; to dress the face of (a stone, a casting, etc.); esp., in turning, to shape or smooth the flat surface of, as distinguished from the cylindrical surface.

8.

To cause to turn or present a face or front, as in a particular direction.

To face down, to put down by bold or impudent opposition. "He faced men down." Prior. --
To face (a thing) out, to persist boldly or impudently in an assertion or in a line of conduct. "That thinks with oaths to face the matter out." Shak.

 

© Webster 1913

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Face, v. i.

1.

To carry a false appearance; to play the hypocrite. "To lie, to face, to forge." Spenser.

2.

To turn the face; as, to face to the right or left.

Face about, man; a soldier, and afraid!
Dryden.

3.

To present a face or front.

 

© Webster 1913