Facile

By Deane Barker

Definition: easy, shallow, or simplistic

It’s often used to mean “overly simplistic.” Someone who has a “facile solution” is not thinking about the problem hard enough.

Why I Looked It Up

I’ve been seeing this word forever. I think that I thought it mean flexible?

I can’t remember exactly where I found it, but I kept the quote, so it much have been an apologetic of some kind:

Faith is too easy, too facile.

Postscript

Added on

I was in Montreal airport when I saw a sign which said, in French:

3 Etapes Faciles

The translation was:

3 Easy Steps

Postscript

Added on

From The Family:

A lifetime of lying to achieve his goals made the President facile in this crisis…

This was (obviously) about George H.W. or George W. Bush, though I can’t remember which one. Likely, the latter.

It’s an example of the “simplistic” definition of facile, rather than simple. To be facile means to be out of your depth.

This is item #317 in a sequence of 953 items.

You can use your left/right arrow keys to navigate