More Inigo Montoya Words

Time for another installment of Inigo Montoya words. Today we look at restive and factitious.

Restive sounds like it should describe a state of rest. But it actually describes something that is impatient regarding control or restraint or delay. It can also describe something that is stubborn or refusing to go forward, or balking at something. It’s been around since the early 1400s, when it arrived in English from the French word restuffe, which meant “not moving forward.” Restuffe came from an earlier (Middle French) word restif, that meant brought to a standstill, like traffic in Los Angeles. There is a Modern French word, rétif, that has the same root. Originally restricted in meaning to just “not moving forward,” the word apparently grew restive and in the 1680s developed the additional meaning of “unmanageable”, according to etymonline.com, having “evolved via [the] notion of a horse refusing to go forward.” So restive is anything but restful.

Our other word today is factitious. Factitious sounds like it should mean full of facts. It also is an adjective, used to describe something that is created rather than natural, planned rather than spontaneous, artificial rather than real.  It’s been around in English since the 1640s, having arrived straight from the Latin word factitius, which means artificial and comes from factus, which is the past participle of facere, from which we get multifarious, surfeit, and nidify. Facere means “do” or “make”, and it is in the sense of “make” that it is used here.

We get a lot of words from facere, including misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance. While these three words might be familiar, the word feasance, from which they are formed, may not be. Since it has the root word facere, arriving in English through the French word faire, both of which mean "to do," it has the legal sense of doing something as a condition or a duty. But what’s the difference between misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance?

According to etymonline.com, misfeasance is “the wrongful exercise of lawful authority or improper performance of a lawful act,” and arrived in English in the 1590s from the Middle French word mesfaisance, which comes from the combining of the Old French mes-, meaning “wrongly” and the aforementioned “faire,” that means “to do.” My dictionary has an additional definition of “a wrong consisting of affirmative action.”

Malfeasance, on the other hand, is defined by my dictionary as “the performance by a public official of a…wrongdoing.” According to etymonline.com it arrived in English a century after misfeasance, in the 1690s. It also came through French, from malfaisance, formed from the French prefix for “badly”, mal-, and faisant, the present participle of faire. So in French the difference is between doing something badly and doing something wrongly.

Misfeasance is doing a legal act improperly but not illegally yet its effect may have legal repercussions. Malfeasance is doing something that is illegal. It is often used of those in public office in particular, but applies to anyone. Nonfeasance is the illegal non-performance of an act one is obligated to perform.

If you’re restive, don’t give in to a desire to be factitious and be guilty of malfeasance.