Feckless?

Word of the Day for Friday March 27 2009
feckless / FEK-lis/, adjective
1. Ineffective; having no real worth or purpose.
2. Worthless; irresponsible; generally incompetent and ineffectual .

I subscribe to an online dictionary which as you see above delivers to my inbox a daily word with pronounciation guide and meaning . Usually these are words with which I am eminently familiar and I click on and click off without much thought . Occasionally the word is new and I look with interest but reflect that at my age I am unlikely to remember the meaning much beyond lunch .
Occasionally the word will hold a special poignancy or resonance .
Feckless for example . The name , if I remember rightly , given to one of the three cows in Stella Gibbons' wonderful novel Cold Comfort Farm . Feckless, Pointless and Some Other equally disarming name which might come back to me as I eat my fish and chips later . Or might need to wait till some kind reader reminds me .
Although feckless wasn't actually the word used by Miss Robson our hideous games teacher to fire at me when I couldn't find my place on the netball pitch after she had dished out the bibs with a mysterious GD ( goal defence ?)stamped on it , this was probably the word she was looking for . But although she doubtless ( Doubtless , was this the name of the third cow ? No I think not ) meant that I was pointless , the word she used was hopeless .... or useless , or maybe she said both . Either way , I still remember the feeling of utter humiliation . I think I'd like to have called her a cow . But cows are lovely gentle benign creatures and she was a bully of the first order . I would like to start a new paragraph here but hey ho .... Blogpost is agin me ..... perhaps my post is too long . My good friend Margaret Anne has three sons and her eldest , when just learning to speak , began to formulate ideas . " What are people for ? " he asked , and his mother was momentarily stumped . And probably not for the last time . After her simple description of what people are, he looked hard at her and said "No , but what are they for ?" It remains an excellent question . . My dad occasionally used to call me feckless , or more often "sackless" by which I think he meant largely the same thing . Roughly translated , I've asked you to do a simple task and there you are still sitting reading your novel .....There was a point to this whole post , which occurred to me last weekend and which spurred me to become involved with Human Writes . Of which more anon , when the para function returns ...... meanwhile I shall restore the guest room for the arrival of Auntie Laura tomorrow at the crack of dawn .