In Popular Culture
- In Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë used the sneer—as perceived by the novel's narrator, the housekeeper Ellen Dean ("Nelly")—to epitomize Heathcliff's, its lead character's, personality.
- The horror genre actor Vincent Price delivered his characters' lines with a trademark sneer.
- Punk rock musician Billy Idol is also known for a trademark sneer usually accompanied by fist-pumping and a rebel yell.
- Vocalist Liam Gallagher in rock band Oasis often has a sneering quality to his singing.
- In the Harry Potter stories, Draco Malfoy and his father are notorious for their sinister sneers, which represent these characters' sense of entitlement over and contempt for those judged lacking in monetary, power, or family status.
- More than one commentator have depicted pop culture judicial panels such as those seen on American Idol and Britain's Got Talent as regularly sneering upon their hapless contestants.
- The cartoon character Cyril Sneer from the Canadian series The Raccoons has a sneer as his namesake.
- Former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney's political opponents have at times perceived him as looking upon them with a sneer.
Read more about this topic: Sneer
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“O, popular applause! what heart of man
Is proof against thy sweet, seducing charms?”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)