Filing Their Nails

• Main
• All Subpages
• Create New

A classic visual trope -- used almost exclusively with female characters -- to indicate boredom with or disinterest in the events around them: rather than do anything productive, they take out an emory board or similar tool and begin Filing Their Nails. (In a common alternative, they can simply study their nails, inspecting the state of their manicure.)

The exact implications can vary from use to use. Often it's just a visual shorthand for for "I'm not impressed". But sometimes it's a characterization point, a device to identify a person who is shallow and far more interested in trivial details of their appearance than in the events of importance around them. And sometimes it's a deliberate insult by the one doing the filing, all but explicitly announcing that that an opponent or enemy is not worth even as much attention as the shape of their nails is.

They all boil down to an expression of "I'm bored by what's going on right now", though.

Although almost universally a "female" trope applied to females, males can pantomime the nail-filing motion -- or, rarely and depending on the setting, actually file or trim their nails -- for the same purposes.

Although casual nail filing in public is growing ever less likely in the real world (and increasingly seen only in Period Pieces), this trope remains a vital tool for ironic or humorous purposes.

See also I Broke a Nail.

Examples of Filing Their Nails include:

Anime and Manga

• Bubblegum Crisis, episode 4, "Revenge Road": When Priss calls Sylia to ask whether the Knight Sabers can take a job, Sylia is painting her nails. She doesn't stop throughout the phone call. Some fans took Sylia's behaviour as a clue that she wasn't completely human... or, at least, not completely socialized.
• A Certain Scientific Railgun: Whenever we see the (male) executive in charge of the Level 6 Shift Project in his office, he's trimming his nails to make it clear to his subordinate that he doesn't think Railgun is a threat to the overall project, no matter how many labs she destroys.

Fan Works

• A Wand for Skitter. When Voldemort finally comes face-to-face with Taylor (who is thirteen years old at the time) at the climax of the story, he finds her sitting on a throne of skulls in the middle of Hogwarts' Great Hall, filing her nails and complaining about how long it took him to come after her personally.

Film

• In the 1940 film My Little Chickadee, Mae West's gorgeous, fancily-dressed character, Flower Belle, is on a train when Indians attack. An arrow lands two feet from her, and she nonchalantly pulls it out of the wall, then goes back to filing her nails. However, when a second arrow hits...

Literature

• Subverted in This Immortal by Roger Zelazny: when assassin Hasan is forced to fight "the Dead Man", he spends his waiting time filing his nails -- not because he was bored or disinterested, but because he was actually sharpening them before arranging to get poison on them.

Live-Action TV

• Used as part of a character-defining moment during the first-episode setup of the 2009-2014 Lifetime series Drop Dead Diva: ditzy blonde Deb goes off to her audition to be a model on The Price Is Right, while talking to a friend on her cellphone and filing her nails -- and ends up in a car crash because of her inattention.

Music

• In the video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1985 song "Like a Surgeon" (parodying Madonna's hit "Like a Virgin") a nurse dressed like a very early Madonna sits in one corner of the operating room unconcerned with the medical procedures taking place, blowing bubblegum and filing her nails.

Web Original

• When Jaune's attempt to catch a falling Weiss in the V1E8 of RWBY results in both of them plunging to the ground, she lands on his back and sarcastically says, "my hero" while studying her nails.

Western Animation

• One of Shego's signature traits in Kim Possible is filing her nails whenever she's bored and/or unimpressed. Given that she usually does this while wearing gloves (and considering her personality), she is almost certainly being deliberately mocking.