Felicitous

Felicitous (pronounced fi-lis-i-tuhs)

(1) Characterized by felicity; causing happiness or pleasure.

(2) Well-suited to the occasion (of actions, manners, speech, expression etc); something apt or appropriate in the circumstances.

(3) Possessing a particular aptitude to display a suitable manner or expression; possessing an agreeable style.

(4) In structural linguistics (of a sentence or other fragment), semantically and pragmatically coherent; fitting in the context.

(5) In astrology, a planet or other heavenly body in an influential position.

1720s: The construct was felicit(y) + -ous.  Felicity was from the Middle English felicite (bliss, happiness, joy; delight, pleasure; a source of happiness; good fortune; prosperity; well-being; a heavenly body in an influential position (used in astrology), from the Old French felicité (source of the modern French félicité (bliss, happiness; felicity)), from the Latin fēlīcitātem, the accusative singular of fēlīcitās (fertility, fruitfulness; happiness, felicity; good fortune; success), from fēlix (happy; blessed, fortunate, lucky; fertile, fruitful; prosperous; auspicious, favorable) (ultimately from the primitive Indo-European dheh & dhehy (to nurse, suckle)) + -itās (a variant of -tās (the suffix used to form nouns indicating a state of being)).  The -itas suffix was from the Proto-Italic -itāts & -otāts (-tās added to i-stems or o-stems, later used freely) and ultimately from the primitive Indo-European -tehats.  The –ous suffix was from the Middle English -ous, from the Old French –ous & -eux, from the Latin -ōsus (full, full of); a doublet of -ose in an unstressed position.  It was used to form adjectives from nouns, to denote possession or presence of a quality in any degree, commonly in abundance.  In chemistry, it has a specific technical application, used in the nomenclature to name chemical compounds in which a specified chemical element has a lower oxidation number than in the equivalent compound whose name ends in the suffix -ic.  For example sulphuric acid (H₂SO₄) has more oxygen atoms per molecule than sulphurous acid (H₂SO₃).  There are degrees of felicitousness; the comparative is more felicitous, the superlative most felicitous.  Felicitous is an adjective, felicitousness is a noun and felicitously is an adverb.

In structural linguistics felicitous is a technical term used to indicate a sentence is semantically and pragmatically coherent (in the context of use).  It is not a synonym for “correct” in every situation because a sentence can be grammatical yet not be felicitous, analogous with law where a contract to undertake a murder can be found to be a valid (legal) contract because it conforms to the rules for such things yet be held to be “void for illegality” because the act of murder is unlawful.

In use, "felicitation", (complimentary expression of belief in another's happiness or good fortune), the noun of action from felicitate, is often used in the plural as “please extend my felicitations” although it’s now rare and probably something of an affectation by those for whom Noël Coward’s (1899–1973) drawing room scenes remain models of good manners; it may be the ultimate middle-class phrase.  In English drawing rooms and other places, felicitation was in use by the early eighteenth century.  Some style guides note the occasional error of use in which felicitation is used as a synonym for “congratulations” and caution it should instead be though a companion term.  Like the verb congratulate, congratulation implies one’s feeling of pleasure in another's happiness or good fortune while felicitation refers to an expression of belief the other is fortunate; what felicitations should suggest to the recipient is their pleasure is well deserved and should be enjoyed.  Expressions of both congratulations and felicitations can be sincere or wholly fake and those skilled in the art of such things deliberately can, with exactly the same text, convey either meaning through nuances such as intonation or non-verbal clues.  The guides’ distinction seems helpful (at least at the margins) but not arbiters of English agreed.  One of the most consistently severe of these was Henry Fowler (1858–1933) who in his authoritative A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) included “felicitate” in his list of “formal words” as a merely decorative alternative to “congratulate”, lumping it in with other needlessly ornate forms (adumbrate vs outline; endeavour vs try; desist vs cease (layers can prove those two are distinct); extend vs send; proceed vs go et al).  No fan of “genteelisms” in language, Henry Fowler thought there were few exceptions to his rule that the common or vernacular form is better than the formal.

Intriguingly, etymologists note a single verified use of “felicitously” in the 1530s but it's thought probably an error and the form wasn’t to emerge for more than a century.  The now obsolete verb felicitate (to render happy) was in use in the early seventeenth century, during which it picked up the sense of “to reckon happy”.  It was from the Late felicitatus, past participle of felicitare (to make happy), from felicitas (fruitfulness, happiness), again from fēlix.  The meaning “congratulate, compliment upon a happy event” seems to have emerged in the 1630s and the related forms were the verbs felicitated & felicitating; the rare alternative verb form felicify was documented in the 1690s and by the late nineteenth century this yielded adjective felicific and the companion antonym infelicific, neither now in common use but being shorter, seem more convenient than the alternative adjective infelicitous (unhappy, unlucky), in use by the late 1740s, supplanting the late sixteenth century form infelicious.  In most cases, there will anyway probably be better words to use but infelicific, infelicitously & infelicitousness seem more elegant that the alternatives (nonfelicitous, nonfelicitously & nonfelicitousness and unfelicitous, unfelicitously & unfelicitousness).

Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.  So, all the ngrams reveal only what's in the particular sub-set Google’s grabbers extract from their catchments and that indicates the use of “felicitous” & “infelicitous” was most common in the mid-nineteenth century and although the former seems to have been used more than the latter, no conclusions should be drawn about the changes in the state of human happiness.  One clear finding however is that the double-negative form (that favorite of lawyers, politicians and Foreign Office mandarins) never found favor; if people wished to convey felicitousness they bothered not with “not infelicitous”.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

The double negative is though handy to add nuance; whatever would be the surface analysis on the combination, “not bad” is understood to mean something different than “good” and it may be that like “I’m not unhappy”, “not infelicitous” can be useful in that it can be used to convey the sense that although one might not be all that happy, one is not despairingly miserable.  Given the nature of the human condition, it’s surprisingly it’s not heard more often.

Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) and Nikki Haley (b 1972; US ambassador to the United Nations (UN) 2017-2018): Feeling respectively "felicitous" and "not infelicitous" after the South Carolina Republican Primary, February 2024.