It's the word of the day for September 29th.
Today's word is feckless, spelled F-E-C-K-L-E-S-S.
Feckless is an adjective.
It describes people or things that are weak or ineffective.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The New Yorker by Henry Alford.
The players streamed down Columbus Avenue,
serenading passersby with the tilted axes theme song, a pedestrian stopped and stared.
When the axes crossed 66th Street,
traffic momentarily isolated one bass player from the rest of the band,
like a feckless baby elephant stranded on the belt.
A feckless person is lacking in feck.
And what, you may ask, is feck?
In Scots, our source of the word feckless, feck means majority or effect.
The term is ultimately an alteration of the Middle English word effect.
So something without feck is something without effect or ineffective.
In the past, feckful meaning efficient or effective,
sturdy or powerful, made an occasional appearance.
But in this case, the weak has outlived the strong.
Feckless is a commonly used English word, but feckful has proven, well, feckless.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.