Feck
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Feck (or, in some senses, fek) is a monosyllable with several vernacular meanings and variations in Irish English, Scots, Middle English, and Esperanto:
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Modern Irish English
- Expletive employed as an attenuated alternative to fuck (including fecker, fecking, etc.)
- Phonological Hiberno-English corruption of feic, a conjugation of the Irish Gaelic verb to see or to witness; often used in the imperative mood as "Féach!" (pronounced fA-äċ), meaning "Look!"
Having been distributed to a multinational audience, the Channel 4 situation comedy Father Ted inadvertantly helped to export and popularize the expletive sense of feck through its characters' liberal use of the word.
Feck enjoyed additional cultural iconification when Wot4 Fashion (http://www.wot4.co.uk/) spoofed French Connection's 'fcuk' clothing label by producing T-shirts reading "fcek - Irish Connection".
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:
- Efficacy; force; value; return
- Amount; quantity (or a large amount/quantity)
- The greater or larger part (when used with a definite article)
From the first sense we derive feckless, meaning 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.
Esperanto
Esperanto usage of fek is comparable to English use of the word shit:
- Verb: conjugation of the infinitive feki ("to defecate")
- Noun: feces; excrement.
- Interjection: "Fek!" is analogous to "Shit!".
The similarity between the Esperanto word fek and the Irish English expletive feck is coincidental. The etymology of the Esperanto fek is traceable to the Latin noun faex (singular form of faeces).
Sources
- Walker, Colin S. K. Scottish Proverbs. Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited, 1996. ISBN 1-874744-30-0
- Webster's College Dictionary. New York: Random House, 1996. ISBN 0-679-43886-6
- Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. New York: Random House, 1998.
- Irish Dictionary Online (http://www.englishirishdictionary.com/)
- Traduku (http://wwwtios.cs.utwente.nl/traduk/) - Esperanto translation dictionary
- The Alternative Esperanto Dictionary (http://www.notam02.no/~hcholm/altlang/ht/Esperanto.html)