Feckless c***s and feckless flowers
[UPDATE: Scroll down for photo.]
I’ve stayed away from the Samantha Bee brouhaha so far because it just plain wearies me.
I come from a time when the c-word was simply not acceptable in public life, and that was that. It wasn’t something people were fired for using or defended for using. The issue simply did not arise because the word was verboten and as far as I can recall that was respected by all public figures.
Was it the strength of the social contract? Fear of ostracism? Self-respect? Whatever it was that kept people more or less in check, that thing has broken down quite dramatically. And now we have Samantha Bee and so many others who seemingly have removed all the barriers to offensive pubic speech—except, of course, for racism, which is punished harshly if there’s even a whiff of it.
I’m not suggesting we go back to the days when comedian Lenny Bruce was tried for obscenity. But really, it would be nice to have a little more decorum, although I realize it’s a vain hope at this point.
So, why am I writing this post, if I’m weary of the topic? The word Samantha Bee used that actually interests me much more than the c-word is “feckless,” which was the adjective that Bee used to modify it.
Seems to me that I’d gone most of my life without hearing that word, but in the last decade or so it’s come to the fore. To the best of my recollection, “feckless” became a favorite criticism of Obama during his presidency. And in fact, when I Google “Obama + feckless,” I get a lot of hits.
What does “feckless” mean?: “weak, ineffective,” or “worthless, irresponsible.”
It seems to me to be a pretty weak and ineffective word, as well as a relatively obscure one. How many people could define it properly without looking it up? Not very many, I’d guess.
And if Ivanka Trump is feckless, I’m not sure what she is supposed to be so effective at, according to Ms. Bee. Ivanka seems pretty darn effective to me at her major life concerns at the moment: being a good mother and wife, supporting her father politically, running her clothing business, and looking mighty fine. She manages to juggle all of that rather well, whether you approve of her politics or not.
That dictionary site that defines “feckless” also offers some examples of its use in a sentence. The following one fascinates me. It’s from a May 18, 2018 Vogue article about wedding cakes (which I suppose vaguely and distantly—fecklessly—ties into one of my earlier posts from today):
Sprays of periwinkle hydrangeas burst in feckless disarray from clutches of kiwi-green leaves, a leafy halo for the diaphanous peach rose.
I can’t even picture that, it seems so complex. And what is “feckless” (or not feckless) about flowers on a cake? Going to the Vogue article and reading the original fails to illuminate what on earth the author is talking about. But it sparked some pleasant reminiscence about my own very beautiful wedding cake, which I don’t have a photo of right now but which featured an ornament from my great-grandparents’ wedding—a small bronze Cupid with wings, holding a tiny four-leaf clover and tiny wedding band—mounted on a delicious cake decorated with a cascade of frosting-violets that weren’t the least bit feckless.
ADDENDUM:
Here is the much-requested photo of my wedding cake:
And here’s a closeup of the ornament:
To get the detail in the photo I had to light it in a way that ended up making it look more green than it really is. It’s actually more of a bronze color, like in the wedding cake photo.
I am personally offended that someone as untalented and worthless as Canadian Samantha can afford a beautiful apartment (worth nearly four million dollars) in
my beloved old neighborhood (NYC’s Upper West Side).
Samantha doesn’t know what the feck she is talking about.
Your wedding cake sounds grand. Do you still have the ornament? I would love to see a picture of it.
Those “progressives” are aggressively regressive. The Russians would call them “ne kultyurny”.
I second the request for a picture of your cake ornament!
“And now we have Samantha Bee and so many others who seemingly have removed all the barriers to offensive pubic speech . . . .”
Given the context, that’s quite the Freudian slip. (I’m sure it was just a typo, but these tired old copy editor’s eyes still noticed it.)
As for “feckless,” my unfortunate baseball team has been described more than once by the Philadelphia papers as the “feckless Phillies.” I guess sportswriters just can’t resist alliteration.
When I started reading National Review regularly in the early 2000s, I found myself often running into “feckless” and “gormless.”
They are similar. I kept getting them confused and still do.
Gormless: lacking in vitality or intelligence; stupid, dull, or clumsy.
Well, I think Ivanka has plenty of feck and lots of couth.
PA Cat:
That’s funny—I didn’t catch that typo. Maybe actually a Freudian slip, though. I’m not at my computer now, so I can’t fix it. Maybe I’ll let it stay.
“What does “feckless” mean?”
In the political context in which Bee used it, I vote for “worthless”. Leftist activists certainly see Ivanka as a worthless c**t. One they’d like to see raped, repeatedly. Yes, their hate is that deep.
Hyperbole?
Watch closely the utter hate on this young woman’s face at the end of this brief clip.
“female protester spits on police officer”
https://www.facebook.com/NatalieBomkeFox32Chicago/videos/829712377227450/
How do you deal with people who are committed to destroying all you hold dear?
It won’t and isn’t limiting itself to appalling language.
Love the Freudian slip, though I missed it until PA Cat pointed it out. We see that one surprisingly often in the legal briefs filed in the court where I work. Even more often, we see my favorite typo — what’s meant to be a reference to the “marital” residence in a divorce case, accidentally spelled “martial.” Unintentional, maybe, but often quite apt.
Feckless – barren, ineffectual, fruitless, pointless, unproductive, useless.
A terrible adjective to use with that noun in a tirade sparked by a photo of a mother and her child. A photo that completely negates meaning of the adjective.
Here, here, I’ll second (or is it third or fourth by now?) that your wedding cake sounds interesting – and not at all feckless.
The photos of my wedding cake and ornament have been posted. To see them, just scroll down towards the end of the post.
My wedding was fairly modest, and small. About 35 people in all.
That was the status of the c word when I emigrated to Australia in the mid 70s. Not in Australia – it was used liberally but nearly always applied to men – about, say, a boss you didn’t like. It is even more commonly used in Zimbabwe where in even friendly fashion one man will say to an other “Don’t be a c***.” meaning no more that “Stop being difficult.” On feckless I would say that it certainly describes Obama well at times – like in his dealings with Iran. But not at all in his dealing with bin Laden or al Ameriki. Whatever he was he wasn’t gormless although that word could be applied to his predecessor more aptly when he told us that Islam was a religion of peace right after 9/11 or that the remedy for bureaucratic failure was a Department of Homeland Security. Generally, I’d say there is plenty of ‘feck’ and ‘gorm’ to go around inside the beltway.
It is easy enough to get the statue back to bronze with colour adjustments in a photo program which has sliders or the like to adjust the colour balance. They are available cheaply on phones. Great little cupid.
My whole life, until just a minute ago, I always thought the word was “freckless”
My whole life, until just a minute ago, I always thought the word was “freckless”
Geoffrey Britain: “How do you deal with people who are committed to destroying all you hold dear?”
Or, to put it another way —
Q: How do you “compromise” with those who wish to see you dead?
A: Kill yourself, and save them the bother.
Geoffrey Britain: “How do you deal with people who are committed to destroying all you hold dear?”
Or, to put it another way —
Q: How do you “compromise” with those who wish to see you dead?
A: Kill yourself, and save them the bother.
I had irresponsible and weak in my mind for feckless, with a similar irresponsibility as aristocrats often showed while being reckless, yet in a wimpy pursuit.
There’ also a hint hint of whimsy – fickle.
Fickle reckless >> feckless.
I’d say that feckless is an odd word to speak of the “feckless disarray”, but not necessarily wrong. Feckless = ineffective = disorganized = randomly strewn or something like that.
Your wedding cake was lovely – no fecklessness there!
As for the other word: I blame Eve Ensler.
I come from a time when the c-word was simply not acceptable in public life,
Not acceptable in private life, either, forty years ago.
I’m sure in my mother’s circle of friends, it never passed their lips. In my father’s, only in settings which were strictly stag and booze-steeped. In my sister’s, only to describe another woman they absolutely loathed. It was the ultimate cuss term, the DefConOne of cuss terms. The one place I can recall seeing it in print was in National Lampoon in the mock letters section. A reader writes in on how his career has been wrecked by the star power of Catherine Deneuve. “I thought I was numero uno, and this c**t eats me for breakfast”. The letter was signed “Poppin’ Fresh Sunnyside, NY”.
So, yeah, this guy
https://www.pillsbury.com/doughboy
Regarding “feckless”.
In my experience it mostly seems to be a word that has been affectedly employed by progressives for the “devastating literary” effect which they delusionally suppose it produces.
One particular fellow who used it regularly in ways that made no real sense, fancied himself a word stylist, and was not shy about saying so. He went on and on about “Feckless gun owners … blah blah …”
Progressives very much believe in the status-conveying power of words; magic and otherwise. They believe in that almost as deeply as they believe in the power of sarcasm to wound, or that the use of irony will establish their intellectual bona fides.
Hence, they are chronically arch.
As for the other word, as far as I have noticed it’s something brought over from Britain into more mainstream use. One sees it used repeatedly in “In Bruges”.
Now in that film, men are violent and will kill. But my guess is that most progressives would be shocked if the person they said that to, to their face, received back from them a hammer blow to their nose.
Whaaaaa …
They just be styling, after all.