DEPARTMENT OF WRITING NEW ZEALAND
  • Home
  • Bid writing
    • Shipley partnership
  • Business writing
  • Writing training
    • Individual writing training
    • Register
  • Contact

Etc.
Words about words.

The feckless boyfriend

14/10/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Last issue's Word of the Week, feculent, put me in mind of a similar word that a girlfriend's mother once archly used to describe me - feckless.

Despite their obvious similarities, however, feculent and feckless have entirely different roots. Scottish in origin, feckless is a variant of feck, from effeck or effect. A feckless person is one so spineless and jelly-like as to be incapable of causing anything. How rude!

 Does feck in the Scottish sense have any connection with feck, the expletive so popular among the Irish? Indeed it does. While you may be excused for thinking that feck the swear word is simply a more palatable version of you-know-what, it also conveys a sense of uselessness (as in feckless).

 Two other meanings of feck are steal and throw contemptuously, as in "he fecked $10 from his mum's purse" and "he fecked me the remote, the pig". That makes it a hard working word indeed, unlike those feckless layabouts it is sometimes used to describe.

 As for my girlfriend's mother, I hope for her sake that she eventually changed her opinion of me. Today, that girlfriend is my wife.


0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    May 2018
    October 2017
    August 2017
    April 2017
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    September 2015
    July 2015
    April 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    July 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

    View my profile on LinkedIn
Copyright. 2023 Department of Writing
  • Home
  • Bid writing
    • Shipley partnership
  • Business writing
  • Writing training
    • Individual writing training
    • Register
  • Contact