- 1沒出息的、不長進的
A feckless person lacks drive and follow-through: they do not take hold of their life, and they often achieve little. It is harsher than lazy. You might still like them, but you would not trust them with money, a deadline, or a child. The word is a little old-fashioned and more at home in British and Irish English, and in writing, than in American small talk. It is a judgment, often from someone older or more serious. It does not mean unlucky, and it does not mean wild — reckless is the word for dangerous . And despite how it looks, the feck here is an old of effect, not a polite stand-in for a swear word.
組成From Scots feckless, a variant of Scots fectless (“ineffectual”), which is effectless with the first bit dropped: equivalent to effect + -less (without effect).
同家族的字
- effectthe word Scots shortened to feck; feckless is “without effect”
- fecklesslythe adverb: in a feckless way
- fecklessnessthe noun: the quality of being feckless
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
fecklessadj/ˈfɛkləs/
- 1
Lacking purpose.
- It is the beauty of great games when they are played at their highest level and the extraordinary thing now is that we do not have to trawl back through all the years of your inexorable progress from feckless beach boy to master sportsman.
- 2
Without skill, ineffective, incompetent.
- This was the West Lancashire Railway, an ambitious but feckless little concern which, in a life lasting a quarter of a century, never earned a dividend, failed to keep up its debenture payments (despite a dangerous attempt to do so by issuing more debentures) and ended up in the hands of a receiver.
- “Lana, when I want you to talk, I will tell you. And until then, zip it.” “Wha-- what did I do?” “Nothing.” “Yeah, Lana.” “Which is why these feckless idiots lost 200 kilos of cocaine.” “Yeah, Lan-- oh. OK. Technically. But then we stole a plane loaded with, like, twice as much cocaine.” “Is this the part where you tell me to look under my seat?”
- 3
Lacking the courage to act in any meaningful way.
- China is “proving to be a feckless friend for its authoritarian allies,” Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China under President Joe Biden, wrote on X.
- 4
archaicLacking vitality.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。