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vocabulary
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facile
in a sentence

show 62 more with this conextual meaning
  • The second line I have resurrected from the void may be a little too facile, but I have kept it.†   (source)
  • And your mind is as facile as a young lamb leaping in a daisy field.†   (source)
  • Nirriti was a small man, with a twinkling eye, a facile smile, dark hair, restrained by a silver band, an upturned nose and eyes the color of his palace.†   (source)
  • Why didn't the intellectual leaders of the Jewish people ever go beyond facile Weltschmerz and ironical wisdom?†   (source)
  • Lost and bewildered though I was I could contain myself no longer and I said sharply there was not too little care but too many thieves, and saw them nodding in facile agreement.†   (source)
  • She's facile with standard office technology and an especially fast at typing.
  • The analogy is too facile for so complex a problem.
  • Conklin would give Delta the benefit of two minutes to say whatever came to his facile mind.†   (source)
  • Congressman Efrem Walters, out of the hills of Tennessee by way of the Yale Law Review, was not to be dismissed with facile circumlocution that dealt with the esoterica of clandestine manipulations.†   (source)
  • And the greater the amount, the more facile its release; witness the struggle of the man whose resources permit him to apply for no more than a $500 loan as compared with the relative ease another has with a line of credit of $500, 000.†   (source)
  • He had a hard grin that mocked whatever facile sentiments you might be tempted to shelter in the name of your personal conspiracy credo.†   (source)
  • Over the years, with his facile mastery of languages and the expertise that came with survival, he had become the Agency's point man in clandestine operations, its primary scout and often the on-scene strategist for covert activities.†   (source)
  • A bright commercial calendar hung on the flaking whitewash -a dark-skinned mestizo girl in a bathing-dress advertised some gaseous water; somebody had pencilled in a neat pedagogic hand a facile and over-confident statement about man having nothing to lose but his chains.†   (source)
  • …the older boy, too, smarting from his own dismal performances at school, convinced himself that the deep inward turning of the spirit, the brooding retreat into the secret place, which he recognized in the mysterious hypnotic power of language over Eugene, was not only a species of indolence, for the only work he recognized was that which strained at weight or sweated in the facile waggery of the tongue, but that it was moreover the indulgence of a "selfish" family-forgetting spirit.†   (source)
  • That same woman, it came back to me, who now applauded my virility and passion, had stood quite near me, before a painfully labored canvas, and said, "So facile."†   (source)
  • Am I too fast, too facile?†   (source)
  • Sometimes, instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, 'What is God like?' and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion.†   (source)
  • He thought his facile remark had been forgotten.†   (source)
  • CHRISTIAN: Oh, to express one's thoughts with facile grace!†   (source)
  • She longed to be able to throw into her voice the facile passion of a light woman.†   (source)
  • Its facile charm can offer permanent entertainment only to an intelligence which is superficial.†   (source)
  • In religion he could be, as long as it suited him, the facile echo of Dorothea's vagaries.†   (source)
  • This facile adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best preservative.†   (source)
  • Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot?†   (source)
  • He gave her facile masculine advice.†   (source)
  • Its very situation—withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St. Pancras—implied a comment on the materialism of life.†   (source)
  • Half an hour later they were arguing ferociously, Martin asserting that the whole world ought to stop warring and trading and writing and get straightway into laboratories to observe new phenomena; Gottlieb insisting that there were already too many facile scientists, that the one thing necessary was the mathematical analysis (and often the destruction) of phenomena already observed.†   (source)
  • There was plenty of eggs, butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile in domestic preparations.†   (source)
  • He invented a facile excuse, and having taken the vacant seat next to her, looked round to see who was there.†   (source)
  • During the eighteen months Philip had known him Clutton had grown more harsh and bitter; though he would not come out into the open and compete with his fellows, he was indignant with the facile success of those who did.†   (source)
  • He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress.†   (source)
  • But Roberta was not of a temperament that permitted of any such facile friendships, and nothing had come of it.†   (source)
  • So that while Rosemary was a "simple" child she was protected by a double sheath of her mother's armor and her own—she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar.†   (source)
  • Carol had forgotten her facile hopes.†   (source)
  • Later, in conversation with the young man whose assistant he was to be, and from whom he was to learn the trade, assuming that he was sufficiently willing and facile, he gathered that if he mastered this art, he might make as much as fifteen and even eighteen dollars a week.†   (source)
  • McKisco was "well-informed" on a range of subjects wider than Goethe's—it was interesting to listen to the innumerable facile combinations that he referred to as his opinions.†   (source)
  • Distinction does not consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report—as you are, my Tess.†   (source)
  • "I am feeling very old to-day, Amory," she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardt's.†   (source)
  • The last scene was laid on a roof-garden, and the 'cellos sighed to the musical moon, while light adventure and facile froth-like comedy flitted back and forth in the calcium.†   (source)
  • And girls and women, under the guise of kindly interest, but which, at best, spelled little more than a desire to achieve a facile intimacy with this daring and romantic, if unfortunate figure, throwing him a flower here and there and calling to him gayly and loudly as the train moved out from one station or another: "Hello, Clyde!†   (source)
  • The summer was over, but he had spent the days in watching Eleanor, a graceful, facile Manfred, build herself intellectual and imaginative pyramids while she revelled in the artificialities of the temperamental teens and they wrote poetry at the dinner-table.†   (source)
  • It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.†   (source)
  • In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge and made the most abstruse inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension.†   (source)
  • He was only at his ease amid gross language, military gallantries, facile beauties, and successes yet more easy.†   (source)
  • In the twilight of the workshop the white dust was flying from his tools like a shower of sparks under the hoofs of a galloping horse; the two wheels were turning, droning; Binet smiled, his chin lowered, his nostrils distended, and, in a word, seemed lost in one of those complete happinesses that, no doubt, belong only to commonplace occupations, which amuse the mind with facile difficulties, and satisfy by a realisation of that beyond which such minds have not a dream.†   (source)
  • 'To the Devil with you and your prison,' retorted Rigaud, leisurely, as he took from his pocket a case containing the materials for making cigarettes, and employed his facile hands in folding a few for present use; 'I care for neither of you.†   (source)
  • Facile natures, whose emotions have little permanence, can hardly understand how much inward resistance he overcame before he rose from his seat and turned towards Arthur.†   (source)
  • True, in the august presence of rhombohedral crystals, retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites, Fassaites, molybdenites, tungstates of manganese, and titanite of zirconium, why, the most facile of tongues may make a slip now and then.†   (source)
  • "My love," he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, "you may rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorant onlookers.†   (source)
  • The process of change is often informal, but even legally it is quite facile.†   (source)
  • Some are displaced by other consonants, measurably more facile; others are dropped altogether.†   (source)
  • But that is a too facile logic and under it is a false assumption.†   (source)
  • They may have been thinking, one or both, of a remote era, not yet come to dawn, or they may have been thinking, with the facile imagination of those days, of a period even earlier than our own.†   (source)
  • …mantle of adultery, (leader's) trusty henchmen to the number of ten or a dozen or possibly even more than that penetrated into the printing works of the Insuppressible or no it was United Ireland (a by no means by the by appropriate appellative) and broke up the typecases with hammers or something like that all on account of some scurrilous effusions from the facile pens of the O'Brienite scribes at the usual mudslinging occupation reflecting on the erstwhile tribune's private morals.†   (source)
  • The poor debtor class (including probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the French Revolution to demands which threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy, and the class of property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme.†   (source)
  • The same and similar elements greatly reinforce the congenital tendencies of the dialect—toward the facile manufacture of compounds, toward a disregard of the distinctions between parts of speech, and, above all, toward the throwing off of all etymological restraints.†   (source)
  • Thus it is unsafe, here as elsewhere, to generalize too facilely, and particularly unsafe to exhibit causes with too much assurance.†   (source)
  • The business of writing English, in his day, was unharassed by the proscriptions of purists, and so the vocabulary could be enriched more facilely than today, but though Shakespeare and his fellow-dramatists quickly adopted such neologisms as /to bustle/, /to huddle/, /bump/, /hubbub/ and /pat/, it goes without saying that they exercised a sound discretion and that the slang of the Bankside was full of words and phrases which they were never tempted to use.†   (source)
  • And Raphael now, to Adam's doubt proposed, Benevolent and facile thus replied.†   (source)
  • Too facile then, thou didst not much gainsay; Nay, didst permit, approve, and fair dismiss.†   (source)
  • When we consider The importancy of Cyprus to the Turk; And let ourselves again but understand That, as it more concerns the Turk than Rhodes, So may he with more facile question bear it, For that it stands not in such warlike brace, But altogether lacks the abilities That Rhodes is dress'd in.†   (source)
  • LADY P: All our English writers, I mean such as are happy in the Italian, Will deign to steal out of this author, mainly: Almost as much, as from Montagnie; He has so modern and facile a vein, Fitting the time, and catching the court-ear!†   (source)
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