You know what feckless is, of course. It means ‘ineffectual, aimless, hapless’, and various other words that all seem to have negative prefixes or suffixes.
And you may or may now know what feck is that you may be without it. If you don’t know, I’ll tell you briefly, because my friend and colleague Stan Carey has given a good in-depth look at it, in particular from the perspective of someone from the place where it’s used most (Ireland). Feck is, in short (literally), an aphetic (hacked-off) form of effect. And so feckless is, in origin, effectless. It came about in Scotland first, but it has really latched on in Ireland, perhaps in part because of some other fecks there, including Irish feic, ‘look’. And it is used most often as an expletive, substituting for another word that is identical to it in the consonants.
That’s all well and good. But what is the opposite of feckless? Is it, as my friend Tony Aspler suggested to me, feckful or feckmore? Or could it be fecksome?
First let’s get a grip on what the -less is. It is not the same as the less that stands by itself. When we say feckless we don’t mean ‘with less feck’, we mean ‘with no feck at all’, just as senseless means not simply ‘having less sense’ but ‘having no sense at all’ and sugarless means ‘utterly without sugar, pinky promise’. The two, less and -less, merged in form from similar Old English words. Less comes from lǣs ‘smaller, less’, from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘shrink’; -less comes from lēas ‘without, false, loose from’, from a Proto-Germanic root meaning ‘loose’ – and, yes, it is related to loose (hmm, feckloose and fancy free?). So -less and less are alike in form but not in effect.
Which means that feckmore, while it has humorous potential, doesn’t have the backing of etymology. Also, we don’t use -more as a suffix. On the other hand, Feckmore would make a great name for a country home in Ireland – perhaps one that’s quite the, uh, thing to look at, since in Irish feic as a noun means ‘sight’ (though usually derisively) and mór – always the source of -more in Anglicized Irish place names – means ‘big’. Feckmore could be the acme of Irish fugxury.
Fecksome seems reasonable to me. It’s true that some is not an antonym of less, nor for that matter of -less, though the presence of some does mean that there is not none. But the suffix -some is not related to the word some (here we go again – can these word-suffix doublets not get their feck together?); it denotes the presence, usually ample, of a certain quality, as in tiresome and cumbersome and quite a lot of others. So fecksome is a perfectly fine antonym for feckless. But English speakers have not put this word into effect – no one uses it (at least not yet).
Feckful, on the other hand, can be found in a dictionary. Wiktionary defines it as “powerful, effective, efficient, vigorous” with the note that it’s from Scotland and northern England. The Oxford English Dictionary also has it. And it just happens that the -ful you see on it does come from the same root and have the same sense as full – even if -ful is one letter less full than full. They differ in form but not in effect. So perhaps the lesson here is that when your suffixes get their feck together, so does your word. For which let us be effectively thankful.
Sesquiotica 