Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Welcome back to my weekly series, Vocab 128, in which I sit down with pen and paper and write 128 words beginning with the same letter, in more or less the order that I think of them, before scanning the page and posting it here. The result is a flex of my vocabulary muscles, an exposure of my handwriting to the world, and perhaps an insight into the psychology of my word associations.

Generally, I avoid words that are merely alternate forms of other words, and when I think of such a word I generally default to the appropriate noun form. Proper nouns I exclude as a rule (but we’ll see how that goes once I get to X).

I knew I messed up as soon as I put an extra R in forest and I wanted it to be perfectly understood that I know how to spell forest.

That final crossed out word was fixation, but the standards of what I consider “too similar” when including words is variable and I couldn’t put aside the feeling that it was too close to fix. Then I immediately thought of frantic, and I figured, why not.

I missed the first ‘ in fo’c’sle, but I give myself credit for the attempt. Yes, I know the full word is forecastle.

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

feck·less (fĕklĭs)

adj.

1. Careless and irresponsible: “political prestidigitation designed to distract public attention from his feckless flouting of basic ethical principles”(Doug Ireland).

2. Feeble or ineffective: “Pickering’s life was routinely threatened, and one feckless attempt had already been made to kidnap or kill him”(Garry Wills).

[Scots feck, effect (alteration of EFFECT) + -LESS.]