Listen to the author reading this blog post:
There’s an English saying You can’t judge a book by its cover, meaning that you cannot know what someone or something is really like by considering only appearance. However, we all make assessments based on how someone or something seems to be (even if we then find out that our initial judgment was wrong). This week, I’m looking at the language in this area, covering both single words and phrases.
Let’s start, appropriately enough, with the plural noun appearances, which we use to mean ‘how people or things appear rather than how they actually are’:
As we all know, appearances can be deceptive.
Their finances weren’t quite as good as appearances suggested.
If you say that something is true to/from all appearances (and in US English also by all appearances), you mean that it seems to be true from what you can see:
It was a long and, from all appearances, happy marriage.
The President, by all appearances, enjoyed the occasion greatly.
We also use the idiom keep up appearances to describe someone who deliberately appears happy or successful when they are not, in order to avoid others losing respect for them:
The business had failed, but my father was keen to keep up appearances.
Staying with nouns, the word surface is often used for talking about what a person or situation appears to be, with a suggestion that this is not how they really are. The noun façade means the same, but conveys more strongly that the appearance is false:
On the surface, he was pleasant and charming. Beneath the surface, not so much.
No one was happy working there. The smiles and cheery greetings were just a façade.
A useful word in this area is the adjective outward, which means ‘relating to the way that a person or situation appears rather than how they actually are’. It’s used especially before nouns such as ‘appearance(s)’, ‘sign’ and ‘manifestation’:
If he was distressed at this point, there were no outward signs of it.
To all outward appearances, they were a happy, hardworking family. The truth, however, was very different.
The words apparent and apparently are sometimes used to describe what seems to be true, though may not actually be true:
I suspected that beneath her apparent composure, she was actually very stressed.
He was apparently quite calm on hearing the news.
Moving on to phrases, if someone gives a particular impression, that is how they appear. This phrase is often used to suggest that the truth behind the appearance is rather different:
He likes to give the impression that he’s laid back and easy-going, but he’s not really.
She certainly gave the impression of being happy in the relationship.
Finally, the idiom on the face of it is used when you are describing how a situation seems at first, before you have a chance to examine it more deeply:
On the face of it, it seems like a good deal, but I want to look into it more.
That concludes my post on appearances. If you’ve found it interesting, look out for my next post on fakes and forgeries – things that are definitely not what they seem to be!