Facile

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 1:31 am

I know I've made enough facile posts but according to Merriam-W

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/facile

A "facile victory" to mean an "easy win" is correct English. I would say that it is a misuse, and looking up "facile victory" "facile win" etc many of the examples (though there aren't huge numbers) seem to be from Indian English. Does it sound OK to you?

Other dictionaries list "easy" as a definition of facile too, but to me it always brings the connotation of awful, not worth bothering with.

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 5:29 pm

I don't think you'd find the phrase "facile victory" in many American sports reports. It's the sort of word Americans mainly use in novels to describe a person's skill in doing something.

http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/facile

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 7:24 am

I suspect it's one of those words that has changed it's meaning. The modern meaning of 'superficial, without depth' is given by the SOED as dating from the 20th century. Before that the word was simply a synonym for easy.

The BNC which goes from 1980-1993 does have 'facile' used in the older sense as in this example:
a two-year-old and continued to carry all before her in 1904, notching up facile victories in the One Thousand Guineas (at 4–1 on), the Oaks

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 4:54 am

Are other Brits familiar with Ouyang's usage? If somebody called me a facile speaker I wouldn't take it as a compliment.

Conversely, do A.E speakers use this word abusively much? Does it sound as if I am boasting in the first line of my original post to U.S ears? A quick google search would seem to indicate that most sources grumbling about "facile articles" and such like are British.

If so, the word would seem to be very different in its basic usage in 3 different continents.