Feck - Scots and Late Middle English

Scots and Late Middle English

Feck (or fek) is a form of effeck, which is in turn the Scots form of effect. However, this Scots noun has additional significance:

  1. Efficacy; force; value; return
  2. Amount; quantity (or a large amount/quantity)
  3. The greater or larger part (when used with a definite article)

From the first sense we derive feckless, meaning witless, weak or ineffective; worthless; irresponsible; indifferent; lazy. Feckless remains a part of the Modern English and Scottish English lexicons; it appears in a number of Scottish adages:

"Feckless folk are aye fain o ane anither."
"Feckless fools should keep canny tongues."

In his 1881 short story Thrawn Janet, Robert Louis Stevenson invokes the second sense of feck as cited above:

"He had a feck o' books wi' him—mair than had ever been seen before in a' that presbytery..."

Robert Burns uses the third sense of feck in the final stanza of his 1792 poem "Kellyburn Braes":

I hae been a Devil the feck o' my life,
Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi' thyme;
"But ne'er was in hell till I met wi' a wife,"
And the thyme it is wither'd, and rue is in prime

Read more about this topic:  Feck

Famous quotes containing the words scots, late, middle and/or english:

    “Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour,
    It’s fiftie fadom deip,
    And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence,
    Wi the Scots lords at his feit.”
    —Unknown. Sir Patrick Spens (l. 41–44)

    “I ... would rather be in dependance on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation upon earth, or than on no nation. But I am one of those too who rather than submit to the right of legislating for us assumed by the British parliament, and which late experience has shewn they will so cruelly exercise, would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean.”
    —Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    “There was a little girl, she had a little curl
    Right in the middle of her forehead;
    And when she was good, she was very, very good,
    And when she was bad, she was horrid.”
    —Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. There Was a Little Girl (attributed to Mother Goose)

    “I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on the simple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.”
    —Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947)