facetious

Some people have fun embellishing the truth: they start with facts, but they take A and expand it to AEIOU. It’s all in good humour, though – if challenged, these sparkling wits will insist they’re just being facetious.

The ability to jest is an important facet of a sparkling personality. But somehow, “being facetious” is never thought of as the diamond of humour. Indeed, misplaced facetiousness sometimes ignites tempers, and it can get more than a bit hairy. Someone might become tious.

That means they’d lose face. Get it? Aw, come on.

I owe you an etymological explanation here. Is facetious related to facet? It may be. But it doesn’t mean that a person who is being facetious is being two-faced (or multi-faced) like a cut gem. Although facetious now mainly means ‘treating a serious matter in a flippant way’, which is not always appreciated, it first meant simply ‘jocular, jovial, witty’ – and before that, ‘having manners that are elegant, agreeable, and polished’.

Which is not to say that the connection to facet is ‘polished’. Facetious comes (by way of French) from Latin facetia ‘wit, humour’, from facetus ‘witty, jocose’, which comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘shine’. But the connection to facet isn’t from ‘shine’ either.

In fact, our word facet comes from French facette, which is the diminutive of face – yes, it means ‘little face’. The relation between facetious and facet is via face… if facetious is related to face. Which it may be.

Face comes from Latin facies. And facies may come from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘impose, set, place’, or it may come from facere ‘make’ (which is also the root of fact), or – here’s the possible connection – it may come from the same root as facetus (see above) and fax.

Fax? I’m not being funny. The Latin word fax, which is from the same source as facetus, means ‘torch’ or ‘fireball’ or ‘incitement’. Obviously it’s not related to the English word fax. Which means ‘hair’.

I’m still not jesting! Although today the only fax we know and use is a clipping of facsimile, in Old English the word for ‘the hair of the head’ was feax, and that, with ease (and without Es), became fax in Middle English and Early Modern English… and then fell out of usage by around the time of Shakespeare. We do still see it in names such as Fairfax and (perhaps, but perhaps not) Halifax. But that’s irrelevant. Sorry.

So… does the message come through? Facetious comes from facetus, which may be related to facet but only by way of face (and maybe not that), and it’s also related to fax but only the fax that means ‘torch’ and not the fax that means ‘hair’ or the more recent ‘facsimile’. And so, starting with facetious, once I’ve paid out the IOU and left behind the E, we end up with just the facts.