The oldest use of the word “facepalm” (but not the actual, physical action) dates back to the early days of the internet. In 1996, where the first netizens mentioned it in a variety of posts about everyday life. This points to the fact that this phrase was in the popular lexicon earlier, as the posters do not clarify what the word means and use it nonchalantly.

However, the actual post, of holding one’s face in your palm, is relatively old, and found in statues and sculptures going back hundreds, if not thousands of years. Normally, it was associated with more serious loss, like Henri Vidal’s Caïn, depicting the biblical figure mourning the death of his own brother, who he killed. 

Due to the internet and the general ubiquity of this emotion, the facepalm remains popular, to such a degree that there is even a facepalm emoji (Unicode U+1F926) and a vast library of stock images depicting this action. While commonly reaction images of humans facepalming were used, one can now even find animals doing the gesture, most likely by accident, but it’s always fun to imagine a cat actually facepalming. 

For those that see something not worth a full facepalm, as it is a bit dramatic at times, you can use the good old disappointed head shake, that one’s grandparents will tactically deploy when they see anything that confuses them. Over text, one can quickly and easily communicate their disappointment with the good old acronym smh (shaking my head) which is actually older than good old facepalm. 

On the other hand, should one need to deploy stronger language, there is always the trusty face desk aka the head desk. While we do not recommend you actually do this, be sure to upvote the posts that go beyond a facepalm. This is a stronger emotion, one so visceral that the victim wants to physically bash the thing they just read or heard right out of their head. 

The reality is that there have always been people who might cause us to facepalm. Bad decisions and horrible opinions are deeply human and probably existed before language. So it’s overall a net positive that we have methods to immediately “get it out of our system” when someone does something so deeply idiotic that it makes us feel bad by proxy. As long as we don’t facepalm too hard. 

Similarly, while the internet allows us to see more facepalm-inducing moments, on the flip side, it lets us publicly shame people with ideas this bad and it communicates to others who might have similar ideas that in reality, they are wrong and should keep it to themselves. Someone is not a bad person for being wrong but sticking by an objectively terrible opinion even when presented with contrary evidence is pretty childish. If you want to keep facepalming, Bored Panda has got you covered, check out our other article on this topic here.