Difficult Words : Facetious, Fabrication, Facile, Farcical, Fastidious and Fatalist
Facetious (fuh SEE shus) adj: humorous, not serious, clumsily humorous David was sent to the principal's office for making a facetious remark about the intelligence of the French teacher. Our proposal about shipping our town's garbage to the moon was facetious, but the first selectman took it seriously. Facile (FAS il) adj: fluent, skillful in a superficial way, easy To say that a writer's style is facile is so say both that it is skillful and that it would be better if the writer exerted himself or herself more. The word facile almost always contains this sense of superficiality. Joe's poems were facile rather than truly accomplished. If you read them closely, you soon realized they were filled with clichés. The bank president was a facile speaker. He could speak engagingly on almost any topic with very little preparation. He spoke with great facility. Farcical (FARS i kul) adj: absurd, ludicrous Farcical means like a farce, which is mockery or a ridiculous satire. The serious play quickly turned farcical when the leading man's belt broke and his pants fell to his ankles. The formerly secret documents detailed the CIA's farcical attempt to discredit Fidel Castro by sprinkling his shoes with a powder that was supposed to make his beard fall out. Fastidious (fa STID ee us) adj: meticulous, demanding, finicky almost before they hit the floor Jed was so fastidious in his work habits that he needed neither a wastebasket nor an eraser. The fastidious secretary was nearly driven mad by her boss, who used the floor as a file cabinet and his desk as a pantry. Fatalist (FATE uh list) n: someone who believes that future events are already determined and that humans are powerless to change them Fatalist is closely related to the word fate. A fatalist is someone who believes that fate determines everything. The old man was fatalist about his illness, believing there was no sense in worrying about something over which he had no control. Bill was such a fatalist that he never wore a seat belt. He said that if he was meant to die in a car accident, there was nothing he could do to prevent it. To be fatalist is to be fatalistic.
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