forcible-feeble

English

Alternative forms

• forcible-Feeble

Etymology

From Francis Feeble, a character in William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, to whom Falstaff derisively applies the epithet forcible.

Adjective

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

1. (archaic) Having a vigorous appearance, but in reality 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, chapter III, in Hawthorne‎^[1], London: Macmillan & Co., page 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^[2], part III:

     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 […]

References

• “forcible-feeble”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.