The whole point of published writing is to put enough effort into one-to-many communication to be clear, concise, and expressive. Finding the right words (not the fanciest or rarest words) helps writing to better transmit intention from author to reader.
Careful revision and editing should be celebrated as expressing appreciation for readers, not sneered at as inauthentic.
I guess someone needs a better dictionary (this was sourced from Dictionary.app on MacOS, btw...)
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> I guess someone needs a better dictionary (this was sourced from Dictionary.app on MacOS, btw...)
I think you are reinforcing the authors point. That definition most certainly does not present a mental image of prose in which the best word is 'facile'. Instead it makes me think that 'facile' is almost indistinguishable from 'ignorant'.
Compare that definition to the one from Websters 1913-1928 definition:
Fac"ile (?) a. [L. facilis, prop., capable of being done or made, hence, facile, easy, fr. facere to make, do: cf. F. facile. Srr Fact, and cf. Faculty.] 1. Easy to be done or performed: not difficult; performable or attainable with little labor.
*Order . . . will render the work facile and delightful.*
Evelyn.
2. Easy to be surmounted or removed; easily conquerable; readily mastered.
*The facile gates of hell too slightly barred.*
Milton.
3. Easy of access or converse; mild; courteous; not haughty, austere, or distant; affable; complaisant.
*I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet.*
B. Jonson.
4. Easily persuaded to good or bad; yielding; ductile to a fault; pliant; flexible.
*Since Adam, and his facile consort Eve,
Lost Paradise, deceived by me.*
Milton.
*This is treating Burns like a child, a person of so facile a disposition as not to be trusted without a keeper on the king's highway.*
Prof. Wilson.
5. Ready; quick; expert; as, he is facile in expedients; he wields a facile pen.
Miss Adebayo visited and said something about grief, something nice-sounding and facile: Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved. —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
“Joker” takes off from a facile premise and descends into incoherent political trolling as a result of scattershot plotting and antics—its director, Todd Phillips, appears not to see what he’s doing. —The New York Times
Unless you read a lot into definition 4 of Webster's, the app dictionary, or even the word 'shallow,' gives a result much more accurate to how I've seen the word actually used. With more than a century and a half since the dictionary was first published, seems like plenty of time for a shift in meaning to happen.
It is pretty common for words to diverge in meaning and drop old connotations as they find distinct niches.