the.com/seriousness
The art of hiding panic behind a calm face and a nodding head.
means The quality of treating something with weighty, unsmiling attention rather than joking around.
from From 'serious,' borrowed via French 'sérieux' from Late Latin 'seriosus,' rooted in Latin 'serius' meaning weighty or grave — a word whose own deeper roots are uncertain, possibly tied to an old Indo-European sense of 'heavy' or 'burdensome.' The '-ness' is just English's workhorse suffix, bolted on to turn the quality into a noun you can carry around.
- etymology
- from Latin serius, meaning weighty, not funny
- paradox
- the most serious people rarely laugh at themselves
- overuse risk
- too much of it reads as fear of being wrong
- best disguise
- often worn by people improvising the whole time