Resources
Facility
Too Facile By Half
By Evan Jenkins
“Facility” is a graceful, useful word denoting ease, dexterity, fluency, and other attractive qualities, as when music is “played with impressive technical facility and panache.” It can also be used to characterize concrete objects designed to make life easier: “Facilities may be limited at these smaller outposts.”
But the way in which it’s used most often — more and more every day
— is as a substitute for other, much more precise words that describe structures, places, equipment, and more. That’s flabby and irritating.
And ubiquitous; the files teem with everything from “horse facilities” (stables) to “breeding facilities” (puppy mills) to a “laundry facility” to a “hemophilia treatment facility” and a “sewer treatment facility”; to “gambling facilities” and “physical fitness facilities” and — honest — “state-of-the-art fermentation facilities.” Nor do prisons or jails remain in much of the English-speaking world. You know what they are.
The word is maddeningly convenient when we’re in a rush. But really, we should try harder. A hospital is a hospital, a factory is a factory, an outhouse is an outhouse.
CJR
