Talk:feckless

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

This word was previously marked with a {{UK}} template on the inflection line. I've removed this and added a {{UK}} template to each of the definition lines, as this is what I expect it was trying to signify, but thought it prudent to see if any/all senses are not UK specific. Thryduulf 02:49, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I removed the tag from 1 & 2, because those meanings would be the meanings understood here, but I do not believe the term is used much in the US in any of its senses. How widely used is it in the UK? DCDuring TALK 08:58, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

1 and 2 are in widespread use, 3 is used but not as much in my experience. Sense 4 is marked as archaic and that seems appropriate. Thryduulf 10:06, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Of the first 100 hits at google news (current), about 60% are non-US. That seems high. I am not sure how to note quantitative differences effectively. The tags seem inappropriate when it is not a meaning difference or extreme difference in frequency. Usage notes if nothing else comes to mind? DCDuring TALK 10:34, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Context templates could be used, perhaps {{rare|except|UK}} or {{rare|_|in|_|US}}, although the latter would categorise in both category:Rare and Category:US, both of which would be misleading at best. Perhaps usage notes are the way to go? Thryduulf 11:54, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

"rare except UK" isn't bad. Hard-coded contexts (using italbrac) and explicit categories would also work, but usage notes allow a bit more nuance, which seems warranted for this case. DCDuring TALK 14:29, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Except that, judging in part from the fact that the citation given for sense 1 is from Canberra, this is not so much rare-except-UK as common-except-US or common-except-NA (at least in some senses). -- Visviva 15:00, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I think we should have context labels like {{rare in US}}. Is there any reason we shouldn't? -- Visviva 15:00, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I have no further ideas about how to determine the facts of the matter. Is there a good free source of word frequency data for US? I erred above: I also believe that the word is not "rare". It is just relatively less frequently used in US. DCDuring TALK 15:13, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, the BYU corpus [1] gives 165 hits for "feckless." These include hits from eminently American publications such as Newsweek and The New Yorker. So unless closer examination shows the specific articles to have been written by non-US natives, I guess this isn't really terribly rare in American English. That's about 1 occurrence per 2.2 million words of running text; by way of comparison, the BNC has 69 hits, or about 1 occurrence per 1.4 million words of running text. Probably not a significant difference (though I'm too lazy to do an actual significance test). Haven't looked into which senses are best represented in the respective corpora. -- Visviva 16:10, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Agreed that we do not have a "clinically significant" difference (confounding statistical significance and amount of the difference) between US and UK, assuming that the corpera actually reflect country of origin. Given all the more extreme problems with our entries (outright error, contradiction, etc.), modest differences between US and UK in relative frequencies by senses probably don't merit much further attention, especially compared to {{jump}} - unless you'd like to, of course. DCDuring TALK 21:31, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Etymology: Aphesis

"feckless" isn't an "aphetic variant" of "fectless", but "fectless" is derived from "*effectless" by aphesis. --77.2.114.135 16:20, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

< obsolete feck "value, efficacy," shortening of effect (Late 16th c.) JMGN (talk) 18:19, 6 August 2024 (UTC)