Facetious vs Impertinent - What's the difference?
facetious | impertinent |
Treating serious issues with deliberately inappropriate humour; flippant.
Pleasantly humorous, jocular.
insolent, ill-mannered
* Tillotson
* Jeremy Taylor
irrelevant (opposite of pertinent)
An impertinent individual.
* (Maria Edgeworth)
As adjectives the difference between facetious and impertinent
is that facetious is treating serious issues with deliberately inappropriate humour; flippant while impertinent is insolent, ill-mannered.As a noun impertinent is
an impertinent individual.facetious
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- Robbie's joke about Heather's picture was just him being facetious .
Synonyms
* See alsoDerived terms
* facetiously * facetiousnessExternal links
* * * English words that use all vowels in alphabetical orderimpertinent
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- things that are impertinent to us
- How impertinent that grief was which served no end!
Usage notes
Although, historically, definition 2 was the original (derived from the French below) usage; meaning gradually changed to definition 1. More recently general usage has come to, once again, incorporate definition 2. As many older speakers will consider definition 2 incorrect, avoiding the word altogether may be advisable. The construction "not pertinent" is one possible alternative.Synonyms
* See alsoNoun
(en noun)- comfortably recessed from curious impertinents
