What the Feck?

What the heck is a feck?

Here's the answer, straight from Dictionary.com:

feck — n obsolete  (Scot)

1. worth; value
2. amount; quantity
3. The greater part; the majority

(Scottish dialect) Fek, short for effect

from <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/feck>

The more common adjective that's derived from feck is feckless, meaning ineffectual or worthless. So?

Well, this is one of those oddments that I find crawling around in the dimmer corners of my mind for no apparent reason. Turns out that my idle contemplation of feckless led me to wonder what feck meant. Somehow, back in the shadows, feck tripped over a similar archaic word that I came across many years ago in Latin class. I wondered if there were any relationship between feck and fex, and hence, any correlation between feckless and fexless. Hmmm.

Urbandictionary.com defines fex thusly:

fex - Turd. Fex (or faex) is the singular of the Latin word feces (or faeces). Although feces has entered English as a mass noun, fex retains the original meaning of a single, discrete piece of shit.

from <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=feces%20weight>

Ooooookay, except for the fact that both feck and fex are obsolete, one could argue that there isn't really a correlation between the two nouns. However, without wading too deeply into the etymology of euphemisms referring to excreta (nasty thought, that), I feel that there is a certain similarity between the adjectives feckless and fexless. Never mind that the root nouns are pretty much opposites (value vs. poop). Also, never mind that fexless didn't exist as an adjective, as far as I know, until I dreamed it up just now. Even my sainted mother knew the term "scared shitless," which - leaving out the physical connotations - refers to a near-paralytic state of terror. Seems to me that a person suffering from this condition has become ineffectual, and it's not too much of a stretch to translate this as feckless. Or fexless.

Therefore, feck <> fex, but feckless = fexless.


This semantic exercise has become thoroughly feckless, to say nothing of pure fex. What the feck?