Complacent vs Complaisant: Understanding the Difference

Overview:

The airtight distinction between these two words may not be as neat as usage gurus have suggested. Sometimes people use complacent instead of complaisant, and vice versa. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell whether complaisant is a misstep. They make an interesting pair etymologically, both coming from Latin, one directly, the other via French.

That old chestnut:

In the swashbuckling book I’ve just finished about the sixteenth-century Portuguese and Spanish marine expeditions to dominate the spice trade – believe me, you’ll want to avoid scurvy at all costs – I was drawn up short by this section about the return to Mexico City of the venerable Augustinian friar and navigator Andrés de Urdaneta, who had just completed a voyage of 11,160 miles from the Philippines back to Acapulco: ‘The people were in raptures at the success of the voyage, complaisantly telling one another that now their city would become the centre of the world.’

What took my attention, of course, was that use of complaisantly when surely complacently is appropriate.

A confusion not quite as old as the hills

Use of one word for the other is nothing new; or at least, potential confusion has been a language peeve at least since Fowler in 1926.

First things first: let’s define how they are most often used nowadays. Simplifying hugely, the core meaning of complacent is ‘smug, self-satisfied’.

Fowler defined the pair most elegantly, if you’ll allow for the inherent sexism typical of his epoch in the generic ‘he’: ‘

He is complacent who is pleased with himself or his state, or with other persons or things as they affect him; the word is loosely synonymous with contented.

He is complaisant who is anxious to please by compliance, service, indulgence or flattery; the word is loosely synonymous with obliging.

The Merriam-Webster Unabridged spins this catch-all definition of complacent very fine into three distinctions, nor does it pull its punches: a)  ‘marked by sometimes unwarranted, uncritical, and irritating satisfaction and pleasure at one’s own personality, accomplishments, or situation’. Miaow!

(Have we ever met anyone like this? I bet we have!)

One of their examples is ‘ It was to make them complacent when they should have been self-critical.’

So, if one is complacent in that way, one might easily lapse into being a little blasé:

b)  ‘marked by or as if by unruffled or blasé satisfaction about the security of one’s position or by careless acceptance of events’. The example is ‘American companies, feeling secure in their big home market, were complacent and lazy … turning out shoddy products that cost too much.’

And one might turn from being simply blasé to a kind of stunted indifference:

c) ‘showing little or no care or interest especially in regard to a serious matter, as in “Perhaps he did so to bring home the sordid realities of underclass life to a nation grown complacent about urban poverty.”’

M-W splits complaisant into two, as does the OED: a) ‘disposed to please; obliging, politely agreeable, courteous’, which, if overdone, inevitably shades into b) ‘Disposed to comply with another’s wishes; yielding, accommodating; compliant, facile’, or, as M-W phrases it, ‘to lend oneself compliantly to their [others’] purposes.

From all the above, then, it should be clear the inhabitants of Mexico city were a tad smug and extremely contented and therefore complacent, not complaisant.

That text quotes from an earlier source of 1954 and from what is presumably a translation of Spanish, so allowances might be made.

Nevertheless, the question is: do people still confuse the two? Burchfield in his 1996 edition of Fowler, was categorical about the meaning distinction: ‘the two senses of each word, [as he defined them] are now clear-cut and should be observed.’

I retained this in my edition but shall have to modify it if there’s ever to be a new one.

In my mind, complaisant associates with husband and suggests he’s overlooking what ‘the’ wife is up to. And sure enough, as I discovered, there’s a Graham Greene play titled The Complaisant Lover. Which seemed at odds with my expectations, until I found out that the ‘lover’ of the title turns out to be… the husband. Interestingly, the Le Robert dictionary gives this as its second sense of complaisant, the word English borrowed: Qui ferme les yeux sur les infidélités de son conjoint (who overlooks their partner’s infidelities).

Do people confuse them?

There are two sides to this coin: a) using the spelling complaisant when you mean ‘complacent’, i.e. smug, self-satisfied, etc.; and b) using complacent in the meaning of ‘(over)anxious to please’.

It’s worth noting at this point that the two words are wildly unmatched in terms of frequency.

For the first, it’s a simple matter of checking the co-text surrounding instances of complaisant. And hey presto, we find some that look like crystal-clear examples of confusion, such as:

rather as Dickens introduced complaisant Victorians to some of what was going on around them in the cities, McKenzie tells us what is actually happening.

and

It’s easy to be complaisant and ignore the climate crisis when it isn’t in your own backyard.

On the other hand, most examples look like the correct application of the term:

And who, these days, is willing to hold those in authority to account? Not the complaisant BBC, or even ITV, who seem terrified of questioning the Government’s coronavirus message.

And then, in some cases I find it hard to decide. Can you manage better than me?

For politicians used to a complaisant electorate and reliant on slender mandates the prospect of a politically aware and involved population could be the stuff, if not of nightmares, of at least fitful slumbers.

The second question, ‘Do people use complacent in the meaning of ‘complaisant’ is harder to answer, partly because of how frequent complacent is, at 70,962 instances vs 219 for complaisant in the corpus I consulted. However, a look at certain collocations suggests that the ‘confusion’ does happen, as in:

 By transferring them to its “black sites,” the secret prisons it was setting up in countries with complacent or complicit regimes around the world.

But of course, the thick plottens when we consider the history and certain definitions of complacent. First, as the OED notes, it was used to mean ‘Disposed, or showing a disposition, to please; obliging in manner, complaisant’ by Burke, Scott and Charlotte Brontë. The OED is tentative, preceding its label with a question mark: ? Obsolete.

Second, the Merriam-Webster Unabridged and M-W online both show complacent bearing the ‘accommodating’ meaning, at 2 a and 3 respectively. Which makes me wonder if this isn’t yet another subtle US vs British English dichotomy. Third, in US usage, so M-W tells me, the medial s of complaisant can be unvoiced – and this is the recorded pronunciation they provide online, though they also show three variants – which makes it sound exactly like complacent, whereas in BrE that s is voiced.

Origins

Both words come ultimately from the Latin complacēre, ‘to be very pleasing’. According to the unrevised (1891) OED entries, complaisant came to English first, in 1647. It’s a borrowing of the French complaisant from complaire, ‘to acquiesce in order to please’. Complacent is based on Latin complacēnt-em and is first recorded in a 1660 work in the obsolete meaning ‘pleasant’. I loved this OED citation from a Restoration comedy:

I am sorry my face does not please you as it is | But I shall not be complaisant and change it.

George Etherege • The Man of Mode, or Sr Fopling Flutter; a comedy • 1676

A palimpsest of peeving

Fowler added a 1924 note to what he’d originally written in 1913: ‘I have since collected a dozen newspaper examples of complac– words wrongly used for complais-, & none of the contrary mistake. It looks as if some journalists had forgotten the existence of complais– & the proper meaning of complac-.’

As we’ve seen, the confusion is mostly the other way round.  

Gowers in 1957 added a note which is worth relishing for its first part: ‘Perhaps because there are fewer things justifying complacency than there used to be [a statement so vague it is unfalsifiable], complacent has intensified its pejorative colour and is now generally used as the suitable adjective for those who are given to wishful thinking. Complaisant is no longer intruding on complacent’s territory, but is tending to disappear, leaving its work to be done by obliging.’

We wish.

Dr Johnson was aware of the ultimate futility of trying to draw up strict demarcations: ‘sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength. … Copiousness of speech will give opportunities to capricious choice, by which some words will be preferred,
and others degraded; vicissitudes of fashion will enforce the use of new, or extend the signification of known terms.’

Amen to all that, says I.