“Say ... cheese?”

From a secret presidential endorsement to innate phonetic linguistics, the roots of this photographer’s phrase are as mysterious as they are practical.

It’s the 1940s, and you’re posing for a family portrait. 

You’re stylishly stoic, a poster child for Victorian class. You know the drill. 

Decades before, you’d sat with your mother and father for many minutes on a splendidly sunny Saturday afternoon to wait for the camera’s exposure to capture your statuesque moment in time. 

Settle in, you tell your restless children, this could take a while. 

Suddenly, the man behind the new Kodak tells you to say, “Cheese.” You look to your partner in a silent moment of shared befuddlement. 

Say what?

You form the first sound with your palate, then the next, and finally the “S”, before you realize with astonishment you’ve formed a kind of grin. This realization makes your pseudo-smile broaden, and before you have time to process what’s happened, the shutter clicks, and it’s over. 

According to Newspapers by Ancestry, saying cheese became commonplace in the 1940s, after the Big Spring Herald newspaper published a blurb on the phrase, deeming it the key to “making you look pleasant no matter what you’re thinking.” 

Interviewee Joseph E. Davies said a “great” politician first gave him the “automatic smile” formula — an allusion, many believed, to Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

Of course, there’s no way of knowing if the late president is the one who coined it, or even if he was the one to mention it to Davies at all. But, as with every unspecified, undocumented cultural saying, it’s fun to speculate. 

It’s nearly impossible, then, to know the true etymological origin of “Say cheese.” However, practically speaking, “cheese” is a naturally smile-inducing word, due to its phonetic make-up, and is thus well-suited to prompt the desired facial expression upon a posing subject. 

The “ch” (phonetic symbol č) parts the lips, poising them to open up for the “ee” (i), which is then suspended by the “s” (s). This process widens the mouth into a makeshift grin conducive to mid-Twentieth Century America’s introduction to the photographed smile. 

But regardless of precisely where it came from and why we still say it, the phrase owes its earliest origins to the development of photography as a medium. 

According to the Digital Public Library of America, in the early days of taking photos, one may have had to sit for up to thirty minutes in one position to wait for the device to do its work. Smiling in photos became popular largely because shutter and exposure speeds quickened astronomically. Instead of restraining one’s children and struggling to find a suitable half-an-hour posture, a person had to be presentable for a mere couple of seconds.

The expression soon became commonplace, and somewhere along the line, people found out “cheese” is kind of the perfect word to elicit the shape of a grin. 

It’s true: “Say cheese” has nothing to do with cheese itself, aside from its linguistic connection to the word’s image. Still, it’s fitting that a food as timeless and far-reaching as cheese be tied to an art form that makes possible the immortalization of time itself. 

Visit www.hoardscreamery.com to view Hoard’s Dairyman Farm Creamery’s selection of artisan cheeses, and remember the makers next time you say “Cheese!”