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:

Contents

1 Modern Irish English

1.1 Feck as an expletive

2 Scots and Late Middle English
3 Esperanto
4 Sources
5 See also

Modern Irish English

Slang expletive employed as an attenuated alternative (minced oath) to fuck

Verb meaning 'to steal' (e.g. 'They had fecked cash out of the rector's room.' James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist (1964) p. 40)

Feck as an expletive

Vernacular usage of feck in the expletive sense is syntactically interchangeable with fuck, though it has no sexual connotations. 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.

Scots and Late Middle English

Feck (or fek) is a form of effeck, which is in turn the Scots form of . 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 , 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:

Verb: conjugation of the infinitive feki ("to defecate")
Noun: feces; excrement.
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