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Or maybe 薄笑い (faint smile)? That was my first thought.
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Glimlach is most definitely used to indicate a closed-lipped smile in my region. You made me curious on the dictionary definition, and it says it’s smiling features without any audible laugh or other sounds of mirth. Interesting. 
That feels like a very archaic term. ^-^ Maybe still used in some parts of the country, but I’ve never encountered that word in speech, and maybe once in writing in my thirty years.
Looking up the definition, monkelen is also not a neutral, or even positive thing to do.
I’m seeing it defined as grinning in a cheeky/naughty way, or secretly laughing in self-satisfaction or mockery. Monkelen is also considered a synonym of meesmuilen, which means an evil or mocking laugh.
I’m also getting hits for use in Flemish, so I wonder if Belgium uses it more/differently. Very different Dutch words are still in circulation there that don’t get used here anymore.
And at some point today I hope to actually look up some Japanese words again, rather than my boring native tongue. 
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Interesting, thanks. I’ve enjoyed the excursus. And you actually nailed the region, even though the conversation took place in Gröningen, the speaker was indeed Belgian.
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Very true… you could use ‘to kill’ (as in ‘kill the lights’), but it’s a bit unnecessarily dramatic in most situations, and I can’t imagine it would sound natural for most things (you might say ‘kill the engine’ but I can’t imagine saying ‘kill the car’!).
I’m guessing 消す carried over from when lights were things that needed to be extinguished, and then just evolved into being a general ‘turn off’ word, whereas the same evolution didn’t occur in English.
gonna try to think up some good words - I like this thread!
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Today, I was thinking about colours! So I did some random searching around.
First stop: black sheep (a person that (negatively) stands out from their group because they are different)
Searching just for that led to:
爪弾き - black sheep (of a family); ostracism
This also led to a tatoeba hit for:
厄介者はどこにでもいるものだ。
There is a black sheep in every flock.
Not knowing all the elements for 厄介者, I looked at the separate kanji, and I like how descriptive this word is.
Continuing some colour-related probing on tatoeba:
満面朱をそそいで怒った。
He went red in the face with rage.
I was considering the そそいで part. Is that from 濯ぐ? 注ぐ is usually not written in kana alone. 濯ぐ is said to be written in kana alone, but the overal reading I’m shown here is すすぐ.
But 濯ぐ does have a secondary entry that says:
- to have one’s revenge; to wipe out a disgrace Usually written using kana alone, Only applies to すすぐ, Only applies to そそぐ, esp. 雪ぐ
Hmm~ ponders
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Interesting! In Swedish we have a specific word for turning off the lights - släcka (and the antonym tända for turning on lights). If you ask someone “could you släcka?” it could either refer to turning off electric lights or blowing out candles. Some people use it for computers but then the implication is more that you turn off the monitor so it goes dark, not that you turn off the machine itself. For that we need to use stänga av aka shut down (the computer, the car, the radio). But the intransitive version of släcka, slockna, can be used to mean that a person fell asleep (“han slocknade [som ett ljus]” “his lights turned off”).
Language developments to account for technical developments sure is an interesting topic!
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I like the image that comes from 紅潮 (blush, flush). I was wondering how 潮 relates to the meaning, but google seemed to mostly want to give me results in Chinese (where ‘red tide’ seemed to be the common meaning, which would fit better with the characters). So maybe this is a case of a Chinese loan word?
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