forcible-feeble

English

Alternative forms
  • forcible-Feeble

Etymology

From Feeble, a character in the second part of Shakespeare's King Henry IV, to whom Falstaff derisively applies the epithet forcible.

Adjective

forcible-feeble (comparative more forcible-feeble, superlative most forcible-feeble)

  1. Seemingly vigorous, but really weak or insipid.
    • 1850, The North British Review (volumes 13-14, page 2)
      He would purge his book of much offensive matter, if he struck out epithets which are in the bad taste of the forcible-feeble school.
    • 1879, Henry James, Hawthorne, London: Macmillan & Co., Chapter III, p. 63,
      But [allegory] is apt to spoil two good things—a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible feeble writing that has been inflicted on the world.
    • 1922, James Joyce, Ulysses‎:
      Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent the natural resources of Ireland or something of that sort which he described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on the face of God's earth […]

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for forcible-feeble in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)

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