zlacker

I am not concerned … with offering any facile solution for so complex a problem. —T. S. Eliot

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.

>>shadow+(OP)
Those quotes give a much better sense of the word's current usage than either dictionary definition, I think. Myself, I find this usage of "facile" grating, preferring Webster's definition, but that's because I spend a lot of time reading Spanish, French, and books from before 01900; Eliot's quote can be plausibly interpreted either way, perhaps showing how the shift began.

>>shadow+(OP)
It's interesting how the modern usage hasn't crossed over into it's noun form, "facility," which, though essentially the same word, has overtones of competence rather than laziness or ignorance. (Or maybe no one uses that word, and it's sense hasn't changed bc I only read it in books?)

>>kragen+q2
Facile in modern English means "too easy", like a shortcut that leads to the wrong destination.

This meaning has diverged from French/Spanish, where the word still just means "easy".

>>jacobo+Fh1
The fact that you wrote a comment restating my own leads me to suspect that my own comment was unclear. Thank you for clarifying it.

>>howLon+fc
Besides 'facile' and 'facility', there are a few other words from the same root: 'faculty', 'facultative', 'facilitate'.

It is pretty common for words to diverge in meaning and drop old connotations as they find distinct niches.

>>jacobo+lb2
Yes, but they're not just from the same root, they're different forms of the same word. Ones the noun, ones the verb. They have exactly the same meaning (except for their grammatical function) but the connotations are almost opposite.

>>howLon+XI2
I don’t know much about Latin grammar, but from what I can tell both facultas (whence faculty) and facilitas (whence facility) were standard noun forms of the Latin word facilis. Both of these nouns come to English from Latin via French, and neither was newly generated in English.

In Latin (and thence English) facultas meant ability, while facilitas meant easiness.

The adjective facilis comes from the verb facio (to make or do; from the same PIE root as the English verb 'do'), and meant something that can be done/made; something easy, ready, or quick; or someone friendly, courteous, or compliant.

>>jacobo+lf5
Sorry, just saw this. You're absolutely right about the etymology, but generally the suffix "-ity" in English serves to make an abstract noun out of an adjective. So it seems more likely to me that "facility" is derived from the English "facile" than developing alongside it. All that said, its just speculation, and facultas->facility/facilitas->facile would explain the subtle difference in meaning.