Face It: Selfie Vocab

While talking about someone’s visage is a fancy way of referring to their face, countenance is a little different — it’s face plus mood. If your countenance fills me with terror, you’re making a scary face. If your countenance makes me laugh, you're making a goofy face. A mysterious countenance is ambiguous and hard to read. Someone’s countenance shows their feelings and their demeanor.

Egomaniacs are egotistical — they are egotists. An egomaniac has an overinflated self-opinion. The ego is one of the three parts of the personality defined by Sigmund Freud, and it’s the one that is your sense of self. Being selfish isn’t always a bad thing of course, but the ego (and egomania) have a negative, self-obsessed reputation.

Since the early 1900s, people have been described as narcissistic — which takes egotism and raises it to the power of obsession. The origin of the term lies with the Greek myth about Narcissus, who fell so in love with his own reflection that he committed suicide because he could not marry himself. Not only do narcissists love themselves way too much, they don’t give a crumb about other people.

A pompous person is full of themselves, not necessarily in terms of their appearance, but their importance. If you want to see some pompous stuff, look at any country that still has royalty. Kings, queens, dukes, lords, and the rest are about as pompous as it gets, and a palace is the most pompous home of all, practically screaming “I’m important!” Related words are the nouns pomposity, pompousness, and the concise pomp.

This word, around since the late 1300s, applies to people and birds. In both cases, preening is an attempt to look your best. A bird preens by cleaning and smoothing its feathers. A person preens by obsessively fixing their hair or clothes. A preening person, fittingly, is sometimes called a peacock.

When primping, you preen, you straighten, you adjust, you readjust, and you keep working on your appearance until you achieve perfection (or your hands get tired). Primping has a connotation of vanity, which makes it fit right in with these other words. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with looking your best. Just don’t primp so much you strain your primping muscle.

This word practically defines itself. The vain are preening folks obsessively concerned with their appearance. The vainglorious are the same, but with a heightened element of self-love: vainglorious people bask in their own glory. Vainglorious has been turning up in English since the 1500s. This word is a compound, much like recent coinages such as humblebrag and deepfake.

Narcissists love to look at their own visage, which could be the name of some weird organ near the spleen, but is actually something much more accessible: the face. This word — which has the ring of poetry, but don’t hold that against it — has appeared in English since the 1300s.