Losing face

[Pierre]

What do you think of when you hear the expression "losing face"?

Regards Pierre

[Brenda]

.

Why do you ask?

[Pierre]

Why do you ask?

Because it is a relevant question in the case of Jack the Ripper.

Regards Pierre

[DJA]

Is this going to be a Mary Kelly thread?

[Rosella]

I don't think of mutilated faces when I hear the expression 'losing face', Pierre. Instead, it's usually said of someone who has held a certain position on something and is then humiliated when that position is found to be untenable.

[Shaggyrand]

Humiliation or Nicolas Cage depending on the context.

[Karl]

The expression never makes me think of actual faces actually coming off. Just like if someone says that "the sh!t hits the fan", it does not make me think of feces and air conditioning apparati. Instead, when I hear of loss of face, I think of someone who has been humiliated, usually through his own folly or naivitę.

How about "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face"? I remember when I first encountered this expression, I was puzzled as to what it could possibly mean. I realized right away, however, that it had to be an expression, and not meant to be taken literally.

[Pcdunn]

Mary Kelly didn't lose her face, she had it forcibly removed by a multilator.

One interpretation of your question, Pierre, may be that your suspect had some renown or standing in the community of that era, and that if you prove him to be Jack the Ripper he will lose that renown.
But as you have said your suspect isn't famous, then I don't know what you mean. Was your suspect a relation of your own family, and your family will lose face if he (or she) is proven to be the Ripper?

[Pierre]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me

If someone has experienced A, someone might do B.

A =

Lose face

Fig. to lose status; to become less respectable.
Be embarrassed or humiliated, especially publicly.
To not maintain your reputation and the respect of others

(http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/lose+face)

B =

1)

"Losing face? The symbolism of facial mutilation

In August 2010, ‘Time’ magazine’s front cover featured a photograph of a young Afghan woman, Bibi Aisha, whose nose had been hacked from her face by her in-laws as punishment for fleeing her abusive marriage.

The world was appalled. At Swansea university, historian Dr Trish Skinner was struck by references to the ‘medieval’ nature of the act. “It got me wondering whether facial mutilation really was a typically ‘medieval’ act, and how we tend to apply this term to modern cases without really considering what separates us from the Middle Ages.”

http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2012/11/22/losing-face-the-symbolism-of-facial-mutilation/

2)

"Bodily mutilations, such as nose-cutting, are recorded worldwide from different cultural settings. Hence the custom is not solely an example of “Oriental violence and cruelty” (at times quoted in Orientalist sources from the colonial period). I want to emphasise that I am not arguing from the vantage point of a colonial discourse with its criticism of “degenerate and barbaric” social customs. Instead, this paper deals with the human body as a symbol of society. It is particularly focused on the symbolic significance of nose-cutting and on understanding this violent impulse as a social practice. The underlying notion is that cultural categories, such as “honour” and “shame”, are encoded in body morphology and affect behaviour."

(Honour, Shame, and Bodily Mutilation. Cutting off the Nose among Tribal Societies in Pakistan. Jürgen Wasim Frembgen. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Nov., 2006), pp. 243-260)

[David Orsam]

I do hope that no-one, like MJK, is losing heart.

Or the will to live.

[Damaso Marte]

Japan

[Robert St Devil]

If someone has experienced A, someone might do B.

A =

Lose face

Fig. to lose status; to become less respectable.
Be embarrassed or humiliated, especially publicly.
To not maintain your reputation and the respect of others

(http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/lose+face)

B =

In August 2010, ‘Time’ magazine’s front cover featured a photograph of a young Afghan woman, Bibi Aisha, whose nose had been hacked from her face by her in-laws as punishment for fleeing her abusive marriage.)

Are you alluding to a notion that CE's nose was cut off bc she was an adulterous woman?

[Errata]

There actually is a link between facial mutilations and "losing face". The most cited reason for cutting up a woman's face is to devalue her. A woman's face being her most important asset in the eyes of her attacker, he does it to ruin her in the eyes of everyone else. Thus causing her to lose face for having been the victim of such an attack. And she does. We do judge women with facial scars.

Not that expression's origin has anything to do with facial mutilations....

[DJA]

Japan

China!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1d/Westworld_ver2.jpg

Justin Case.

[Rosella]

Mary's face was mutilated all over though, almost completely destroyed, not just the nose. Of the others only Eddowes nose was attacked, with the tip of it cut off.
So, did Eddowes try some sort of blackmail which would cause the killer to lose face in his community, Pierre? Is that the theory? Or did the killer's wife cuckold him with another man and Eddowes died for it as she was also adulterous?

What about the other victims?