F'ing Brilliant: Feeling fettered, furled, feckless...fecked?! 

More feelings, words, alliterations...Throughout my formative years, especially later high school and college, I became enamored with various wordsmiths, William F. Buckley, Jr. and George F. Will in particular. My children knew I was reading one of their novels or articles when they saw me with a dictionary (now my 'smart' phone) in my lap next to the book or magazine ("What are you doing, dad; I thought you took AP English in high school?" "Exactly, which has given me an appreciation for knowing I'll never know enough words, as well as how the ones I already know can be used"). I'm not sure when I started appreciating the use of alliterations. And I obviously got a good (over)dose of feeling words while majoring in psychology. So, here is yet another post to provoke, expand your own emotional vocabulary, some that have special pandemic pertinence. 

       Word play -- a nod to Bill and George, with an F in the middle...

Felt fettered lately? Of course you have. You have at least complained once if not several times, that you have felt restricted, as if manacled, tied up (sometimes 'in knots'!). This is undoubtedly related to the lockdowns as well as 'lockouts' in a way and and at rate most of us have never experienced (unless we were literally incarcerated or held against our will). But as I have addressed here in a few prior posts, some of the 'fettering' experience is how we process what is happening to us, our attribution (psychology of attribution remains an important subarea in the academic and applied field of psychology). For instance, many individuals, at least earlier in the pandemic, told me that they prefer relative isolation, that they enjoy a lot of 'me' time ("the rest of the world is starting to find out what we introverts have been doing all along"). It's also been of interest to me what tends to happen when restrictions are lifted as many people, after initially enjoying venues and areas from which they were temporarily disallowed, go back to a semi-passive lifestyle, especially as the weather is getting colder here in the northern mid-west. So exactly who is fettering who?

Furled, you say? Not always a bad thing, depending on the conditions. You might strategically furl your flag or sails as protection from a gale. In the case of sails, you might even do this in the absence of any wind, in the 'doldrums', a word many of you have used to describe your recent affect. Recently, many boats furled their sails (as many also furled their flags at home) as protection from hurricane force winds, only to unfurl them as breezes once again became more friendly -- A-h-h, the feeling of a gentle breeze on your face, after you have been able to furl and put away your mask for a bit...What we can all relate to these days, is feeling a lack of control over circumstances we previously did (as well as being "all wound up"). Soldiers and sailors learn there is a right and wrong way to furl a flag and sail, respectively. This is also true of folding these pieces of valued material (one of the most moving memorial services I attended was about a year ago, where the honor guard unfolded and folded the flag four times until they got it perfect, in honor of their fallen comrade as well as "Old Glory"). 

Feckless?! Huh? The first time I remember encountering this word and actually having it register in any meaningful way, was in a William F. Buckley, Jr. novel, in the context of a character being chided for being weak and ineffective. While sounding a bit like a word some of us claimed we said when we did not want to acquire a taste for Ivory soap (like Ralphie in  "A Christmas Story"), the word is actually from Middle English Scots: "feck" meaning "effect" or "majority" so being feckless means essentially you are ineffective, and you seldom see it nowadays. But we have sure felt it at times lately, eh? So the next time you are told you are in the minority, you can say with a straight face "Well, I guess that means I'm not fecked". A caveat: you might want to first ensure your audience is a wordsmith, at least one with a sense of humor.