(He often suggests a grown-up Little Lord Fauntleroy on the verge of a tantrum, his curved lower lip dipping into a petulant scowl.) But if the chemistry they stir up is closer to dry ice than fire, it's genuine in its way.
Sometimes there is a hankering, more felt than articulated, for types with snub noses, shortened upper lips, eyes set on a slight diagonal, and petulant expressions that inspire one to offer them a dish of cream.
The novelist and critic William Gass comments on the following passage from Henry James's The Awkward Age: "Mr Cashmore, who would have been very red-headed if he had not been very bald, showed a single eyeglass and a long upper lip; he was large and jaunty with little petulant ejaculations that were not in the line of type".
Voters' petulant protest ballots have too often been matched by equally immature lip service from those in power to the concerns of voters, but without the courage to take the needed difficult action.
His daughter, Jill (played by the pretty if petulant Margaret Qualley) is a neo-Angela Chase (from My So-Called Life), all red pouting lips, plaid shirts and high school angst, without any of the charm or actual awkwardness that accompanies adolescence.
Dealers also tend to be quite hard to communicate with, either because they mumble over the phone like their lips have been glued together, or because they decide to get weird and petulant about having to drive five minutes to take £160 off you.
Ms. Moffatt's first montage, "Lip" (1999), cherry-picks scenes of long-suffering black nannies tending to petulant Southern belles — "Gone With the Wind," for one — uncovering an American heart of interracial darkness.
Waugh's description is of someone "tall, almost loutish, with the face of a petulant baby", of indistinct speech, who "smoked a pipe which was attached to his blubber-lips by a thread of slime".
