po-faced
/ˈpəʊfeɪst
/adjective British
Humourless and disapproving: don’t be so po-faced about everything...
- So it goes with the po-faced and utterly humourless 911.
- Any social commentary is mostly of the exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin variety and is ultimately po-faced and humourless.
- What a depressing lack of sense too from this increasingly po-faced Government, which displayed once more its desire to interfere, to have something to say about everything.
Origin
1930s: perhaps from po, influenced by poker-faced.
The po in po-faced, ‘humourless and disapproving’, probably comes from the use of po to mean ‘chamber pot’, though it might also have been influenced by the exclamation ‘poh!’, used to reject something contemptuously. In any event, the phrase is likely to be modelled on the expression poker-faced (early 20th century). This comes from the need to keep a deadpan face when playing poker. The game, first recorded in the 1830s in the USA probably gets its name from the German word pochen ‘to brag’.