If you guessed that this word came up while looking into my last post on the word "factotum", you guessed right. I was looking at the entry in the Online Etymology Dictionary for that word and it recommended taking a look at the word factitious for another use of that Latin prefix fac-- which has to do with, well, doing.
I can't say I use the word factitious myself but I occasionally run across it while reading and it's always a bit confusing. On the one hand, it sounds an awful lot like "fictitious", which leads me to think that it is kind of the opposite of that, as in fact and fiction. But usually context is enough to make me realize that there is something a little dubious about factitious, so that can't be right. And then it has an uncomfortable similarity to "facetious" as well, which also has a sense of not being entirely truthful, as in "But I jest."
Do you ever wonder how non-native speakers ever actually learn this language?
Factitious, although with more critical overtones today, really just means artificial as opposed to natural. These days, it looks like synonyms for it are mainly things like 'fake, bogus, sham', but even the Latin factitius, artificial, still goes back to the same facere that factotum hails from, which is simply 'do'. My revered art history professor Mary Holmes always defined art as "something made by human beings, as opposed to the natural" (She went on to say that the real question was, "But is it any good?"). So in that sense, all art is factitious, and most of everything else we keep around us as well.
I wonder when the idea of the made thing began to carry this tone of being inferior to the natural one. I would have thought the 60s, though it seems that the Romans might have started it. But surely if the natural is always better, we really shouldn't have bothered with civilization at all.
Am I being facetious? Well, maybe just a little...
I can't say I use the word factitious myself but I occasionally run across it while reading and it's always a bit confusing. On the one hand, it sounds an awful lot like "fictitious", which leads me to think that it is kind of the opposite of that, as in fact and fiction. But usually context is enough to make me realize that there is something a little dubious about factitious, so that can't be right. And then it has an uncomfortable similarity to "facetious" as well, which also has a sense of not being entirely truthful, as in "But I jest."
Do you ever wonder how non-native speakers ever actually learn this language?
Factitious, although with more critical overtones today, really just means artificial as opposed to natural. These days, it looks like synonyms for it are mainly things like 'fake, bogus, sham', but even the Latin factitius, artificial, still goes back to the same facere that factotum hails from, which is simply 'do'. My revered art history professor Mary Holmes always defined art as "something made by human beings, as opposed to the natural" (She went on to say that the real question was, "But is it any good?"). So in that sense, all art is factitious, and most of everything else we keep around us as well.
I wonder when the idea of the made thing began to carry this tone of being inferior to the natural one. I would have thought the 60s, though it seems that the Romans might have started it. But surely if the natural is always better, we really shouldn't have bothered with civilization at all.
Am I being facetious? Well, maybe just a little...
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Damn me, but I don't know this word. Thanks.
ReplyDeletePeter, if you don't know it, it's well on its way to being obsolete.
ReplyDeleteLet's revive it, then.
ReplyDeleteYour thoughts about this word make me wonder about the origins of that simple monosyllable fake, especially since the letter c often if not always, is
I think this would be a good one for me to write up here, Peter.
ReplyDeleteEr, let me continue that thought:
ReplyDelete" ... specially since the letter c often if not always, is pronounced with the hard-c sound."
Got it. For some reason, I thought I already understood what you were saying, but now can't reconstruct it.
ReplyDeleteOf course we have both face and facetious to make it all more blurry.
I remember Larry King's factoids from that crazy steam of consciousness newspaper column he used to have in USA Today. How we all tolerated that amiable lunatic for so long is beyond me.
ReplyDeleteI think the only time I've ever read USA Today is when one was lying around in a coffee shop and there was absolutely nothing else around. So I had to look up Larry King's columns, and came across this poem entirely compiled from them.
ReplyDeleteThat sort of thing is a standard trope of exhausted, self-important newspaper columnists who realize they can still draw a salary without working. Mike Barnicle used to begin his similar columns "Not that it really matters, but ... " and he was right. It didn't.
ReplyDeleteIt could happen to bloggers as easily--except for the salary part.
ReplyDeleteWell, I have been known to recycle an old post from time to time. But newspaper columnists seem to think the tradition is delightful, It can, it the columnist has sufficient wit to make his or her aperçus worth reading. Most do not, Or rather, most did not, when newspapers mattered.
ReplyDeleteI neglected to mention that Mike Barnicle was a longtime columnist at the Boston Globe who maintained his wisecracking streetwise pose long after he moved out to a rich suburb.
ReplyDeleteWhat else is a successful columnist to do except pose as his former self?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Larry King's columns could have been satires of gritty urban One-Line Runyons.
ReplyDeleteNah, I'm probably giving him too much credit.
I don't know all that much about it, but I fear you are, having seen him a few times.
ReplyDeleteI would see him on late-night television, and I would think: That's someone whose face could scare young children. And that his movie reviews would be quoted in ads and on posters is an indiction of cultural decline.
ReplyDeleteOne half-thinks that for that man to have obtained the celebrity he has must be do to some depraved circumstance out of James Elroy's Danny Getchel stories. So no, I don't get Larry King.
I don't mean as a put down of popular culture, and sometimes I am a willing fan, but a lot of the time I don't understand at all what rises to the top. Larry King is among the least obnoxious of them.
ReplyDelete"Larry King is among the least obnoxious of them."
ReplyDeleteSounds like a cover blurb for a Larry King biography.
I'm sure he can find someone to write a better blurb than that.
ReplyDelete