Today’s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English . Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com The New Oxford American Dictionary defines facetious as “treating serious issues with deliberately inappropriate humor.” But it was not always thus. Facetious is a word we got from French who got it from Latin.  It turned up in English early in William Shakespeare’s life and both humor and inappropriateness were involved, although not at the same time. The author of our first citation for facetious is a fellow named Henry Chettle. Henry Chettle was kind of support player in the world of William Shakespeare.  Chettle seems to have been involved in various aspects of writing, editing and printing of books and plays at the time. In 1592 another writer named Robert Greene died.  Henry Chettle gathered up a bunch of papers that Robert Greene had left with various printers around town and put together a sort of tribute book to Greene…that of course might also prove to be profitable. At least that’s the story Chettle tells. William Shakespeare felt that some of the content was inappropriate and so did his pal Marlow. Inappropriate in that it offended them.  The thing that really bothered them was that they figured it wasn’t the dead hand of Greene that they should be resenting; instead they figured it was Henry Chettle who had authored the book. He denied it and in denying it he called Shakespeare facetious . There appears to be evidence that Chettle did indeed author the work because he stands accused of authoring a couple of other pieces and denying them too—plus more modern computer analysis of the writings also tends to pin the blame on him. But calling Shakespeare facetious wasn’t the mean spirited thing we might suspect with our modern understanding of the word today.  In fact Chettle was doing a little boot-licking and saying how wonderfully funny William Shakespeare’s writing was. Back in Latin and then French the meaning of facetie and facetieux meant witty, funny and agreeable. Similarly, at first, being facetious in English was good-funny and only turned into bad-funny more recently. In fact, although most dictionaries give this negative tone to facetious, the OED doesn’t yet have an entry that explicitly expresses this meaning.  The most recent citations there are from the mid to late 1800s and the closest to negativity that the definitions get is to say that facetious formerly had a laudatory sense. Less