Parliament has been reduced to a facile talking-shop.
The inclination to avert such an outcome with facile talk about the U.S. federal government turning to "socialism" may be an enticing rhetorical device, but it is not a constructive way to deal with the underlying challenge, which is both human — and very real.
Although it is right to protest, against facile talk of the harsh imperialism of Cleon, that imperialism is never soft, an important but sometimes overlooked chapter of Thucydides is nonetheless explicit that Athens suffered a loss of goodwill through its excessive rigour.
He said: "We have got to get away from this facile view that talking tough solves this problem.
Facile Brexiter talk of a more buccaneering Britain – presumably a country fit for Sir Philip Green or Fred Goodwin to capture other galleons – offers precisely nothing to assuage the fears of elderly voters who simply want nothing more to change.
"Some of – almost all – of the observations from certain aspects of the press have been so nonsensical and so facile and fictitious … All the people they were talking about in lots of the stories know the truth".
He told The World This Weekend on BBC Radio 4: "This is the facile tractic the europhiles always use and then they start talking about three million jobs as though the sky is going to fall in of we ask for powers back".
"To say, this person is talking rapidly in rhyme so obviously there's a connection to southern blues, I think that's really facile," Neff says.
Okay, so the talking animals may be over the top; but for all its eccentric drollery, Martha Grimes's new Richard Jury mystery, THE BLACK CAT (Viking, $25.95), is a shrewd whodunit that plays on the facile assumptions we make about people based on their outward appearance.
Designers often talk about rewarding the player for exploration, but usually do so with facile Easter eggs, hidden away in mundane backwaters.
