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)

    “A glimpse through an interstice caught,
    Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a barroom around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremarked seated in a corner,
    Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
    A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and
    oath and smutty jest,
    There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
    perhaps not a word.”
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    “In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.”
    —Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)

    “Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.”
    —Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)