Feck

Feck (or, in some senses, fek) is a monosyllable with several vernacular meanings and variations in Irish English, Scots, Middle English, and Esperanto:

Modern Irish English

1. Slang expletive employed as an attenuated alternative to fuck
2. 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 /fʲeːx/), meaning "Look!"

Feck as an expletive

Vernacular usage of feck in the expletive sense is semantically and syntactically interchangeable with fuck. This includes such phraseological variations as fecker (noun), fecking (verb or adjective), and feckin' 'ell.

The Channel 4 situation comedy Father Ted inadvertently helped to export and popularise this use of feck through its characters' liberal use of the word. In an interview, Dermot Morgan explained that, in Ireland, feck is far less offensive than fuck.

In the movie Almost Famous, the daughter says "feck you!" to her mother, and storms out. The mother says to the little brother that his sister just said the "F-word," to which the son responded with "I think she said Feck." When asked the difference, he merely replied, "the letter 'u'."

Feck enjoyed additional iconification in youth culture when Wot4 Fashion 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:

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 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 use of the word shit in Modern English:

1. Verb: conjugation of the infinitive feki ("to defecate")
2. Noun: feces; excrement.
3. Interjection: "Fek!" is analogous to "Shit!".

The similarity between the Esperanto 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. Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company Co., 1913.
• Irish Dictionary Online
• Traduku - Esperanto translation dictionary
• The Alternative Esperanto Dictionary

See also

• Cognate
• False cognate
• Profanity
• Vulgarism