Word of the day

Treating a complicated question as if it had one easy answer

adjective

The English word

simplistic

English never changes here, whatever language you are reading in.

When to use it

This adjective is never neutral, and that is what learners miss. It looks like a longer, more academic version of the ordinary word for something that is not complicated, so it turns up in essays where the writer means that an explanation was clear and economical. It says the opposite. It accuses an argument of cutting away the parts of a problem that made the problem difficult, leaving an answer that is tidy, easy and wrong. Reserve it for criticism of a policy, a headline or somebody else's reasoning. Applied to your own summary it does not read as modesty; it reads as an admission that the summary does not hold.

Examples

The minister's answer was simplistic: it named one cause and ignored the three the report had documented. Calling the dispute a clash of cultures is simplistic, and it lets both governments off the hook.

Goes with

a simplistic view of an overly simplistic explanation dangerously simplistic a simplistic reading of the evidence

Check yourself

Complete the sentence with the English word above.

1. Blaming the collapse on one bad decision is ___; four separate failures had to line up first.

Show the answer