facetious

The American Heritage Dictionary gives the meaning of this adjective to be “playfully jocular; humorous.” I wondered if facetious had anything to do with faces since facetious behavior so often involves smirks, laughs, etc. More obviously, facetious contains the word face. The AHD tells us that the origin of this word is in the Latin facetiae, from facetus, “witty.” The Latin word carried down into French as facetie, “jest,” ultimately becoming facetieux, the parent of our modern English word. It looks like my face-related hypothesis was wrong. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, facetious first appeared in written English in Henry Chettle’s sixteenth century praise of William Shakespeare: “His facetious grace in writting which approoues his art.” In this case, Chettle was using a now obsolete definition of the word to connote Shakespeare’s style as “polished and agreeable.” It is interesting that the “urbane” and “sophisticated” sense of facetious has morphed into “jocular” and “witty” (from the AHD). I’ll still enjoy this word because it seems somehow delicate and airy to me, and I like that the e in the second syllable is pronounced.