Feck


Feck has several vernacular meanings and variations in Hiberno-English, Scots and Middle English.

Modern English

Feck is a form of effeck, which is in turn the Scots cognate of the modern English word. However, this Scots noun has additional significance:
  1. Efficacy; force; value; return
  2. Amount; quantity
  3. The greater or larger part
From the first sense we derive , meaning witless, 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:
In his 1881 short story Thrawn Janet, Robert Louis Stevenson invokes the second sense of feck as cited above:
Robert Burns uses the third sense of feck in the final stanza of his 1792 poem "Kellyburn Braes":

Debate about the word's level of offensiveness

have received complaints relating to an advert in which a man tells bees to "feck off": members of the public were concerned that young children could be badly influenced by seeing this advert. Magners claimed that the "feck off" mention in the advert was a "mild rebuff" to the bees, rather than an expletive. The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that the poster is suitable for display.
In a 1998 interview on Nickelodeon, Irish girl group B*Witched landed in hot water when a viewer made a complaint alleging that one of the teenagers had used the phrase "fuck off". Although Nickelodeon maintained that the singer had in fact said "feck off", which they described "a phrase made popular by the Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted," the item was found to be in breach of the ITC Programme Code and the complaint was thus upheld.

In popular culture

The Channel 4 situation comedy Father Ted helped to export and popularise this use of feck through its characters' liberal use of the word, especially by the drunk priest Father Jack.
In 2004 French Connection UK, sellers of the popular "FCUK" T-shirt, won a legal injunction in Dublin that barred a local business from printing and selling a T-shirt marked "FCEK The Irish Connection".