Facetious -- Frivolous Word Play

I have to grudgingly give credit to the most recent Sunday Puzzle segment on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday for providing me new appreciation for the words facetious and facetiously. I say grudgingly because I'm not a huge fan of this feature of the show, particularly since they added guest stars' recitations of the rote list of prizes players receive, like it's so much more exciting to hear some minor celebrity's prerecorded voice yammering about lapel pins and dictionaries than hearing show host Liane Hansen tick off the prizes. Anyway, this weekend's puzzle player, Bob Brereton of St. Paul, Minn., enlightened me to the particular significance of facetious and its adverbial form: "[These] are great words because facetious [contains] all the standard vowels of the alphabet in order, and facetiously incorporates the y," which can be used as a vowel, too. That's pretty darn cool!

According to the Web site Fun-with-words.com, the shortest word in English with all five standard vowels in alphabetical order is aerious meaning "airy." The longest such word is phragelliorhynchus, a protozoan (although y as a vowel intrudes before the u so I would argue this isn't a perfect hit). The site also notes that suoidea, meaning the taxonomic group to which pigs belong, is the shortest word in English with the standard vowels in reverse alphabetical order, and the longest such word is punctoschmidtella, a type of crustacean. (Check out the link for more vowel word records.)

Facetious is also curious given the dissonance in the tone accorded to the term by various dictionaries. The granddaddy of dictionaries, the OED, defines facetious as a positive quality: "Characterized by or addicted to pleasantry; jocose, jocular, waggish. Formerly often with a laudatory sense: Witty, humorous, amusing; also gay, sprightly." The New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as a negative quality: "Treating serious issues with deliberately inappropriate humor; flippant." The American Heritage Dictionary says simply: "Playfully jocular; humorous," while the Random House Dictionary offers both: "1. Amusing, humorous. 2. Lacking serious intent; concerned with something nonessential, amusing, or frivolous."

The term came to English from the French facétieux and facétie, which the French had in turn incorporated from the Latin facetia meaning "jest," from facetus meaning "witty."