The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-11-02
WORD RIGHTEOUSNESS.

How Its Change or Meaning was Brought About.
 Facetiousness is the ghastly sitnula- crum of real humor The word is one of those which have degenerated in significance with the lapse of time. "Facetious," in it's earliest use, meant polished, urbane: then it came to be used as a synonyme for jocular or waggish or witty in pleasant and laudatory sense; but gradually the will disappeared and "facetiousness" came to denote waggishness which was of- ten unpleasant, and in any case form of jocosity rather to be deplored than admired. Burke, writing of King
 William l, said that, relaxing with a wise facetiousness, he knew how to re- 1 lieve his mind and preserve his dig nity." No modern writer would care to speak. of "wise facetiousness'' on the
 part of king or commoner.
 1 Dickens abounds with graphic pie lures of facetious folk. Sir Mulberry
 Hawk, we are told, 'leered upon his
 friends most facetiously." Mrs. Camp was much given to facetiousness,
 which, in her case, as in many others, was largely dependent for it's effects
 upon mods and winks and innuendo.
 It was in this sense that Tom Brown,
 the writer who died just two centuries
 ago, deserved the title of "Facetious" bestowed upon him by Addison. And ] it is in this sense also that booksellers catalogue under the. head of Face tiae' those works which collectors of-
 ten know as top shelf books-volumes
 to be kept out of the hands of chance lvisitors to the shelves-in which the
 so-called humor is often merely 8
 mask for something worse. 1 The modern facetious person is us-
 ually dull dog. His notions of humor
 are apt to be like those of the immor-
 tai Peter Magnus, who was not fond
 of anything original, did not like it,
 didn't see the necessity for it; and,
 moreover, was able to afford his friends great amusement by facetious- ily signing himself in ''hasty notes to
 intimate acquaintance" as After
 noon," his initials being P. M.-post
 meridian. The facetious person is often
 a greater punster. Far be it from us to Idepreciate the pun. The superfine per-
 
 iority the foolish saying that He who will make a pun will not scruple to pick a pocket" which is usually, and
 very foolishly, attributed to Dr. John son. The doctor never said anything
 so absurd; but the saying, in all pro- bility, would have been forgotten long 1 ago but for the unlucky error which linked it with his "clarum ct ven- erable nomen." The real author of i the phrase was John Dennis, a critic
 of two centuries ago, who is duly pilor-
 jed in the "DuncIad." But this is by 1 the way The superior person, we say, may quote this absurd dictum; but every one, with 8 decent sense of humor knows that the pun has it's place in the armory of wit, though it is a weapon to be used with discretion and with a nice sense of fitness. On the other hand, the facetious punster, whose whole stock, in trade as a hum- orist (save the markD consists of yer bal quibbles, is a social nuisance. Some one, who might have been bet ter employed, has made a careful search through Shakespeare's plays. and has brought out surprising total of something over a thousand verbal pleasantries-many of them, as every reader knows, depressing enough. But these quips, which were intended to
 tickle the ears of the Elizabethan groundlings, whose appetites for such cates would seem to have been insati- able, are among the disfigurements