Is This Word Any Good?

                












Effete.


















Does this word deserve the space it occupies in the dictionary?

This word has so many shades of meaning, and the two primary meanings are apt to be confused. The word is almost always used in a pejorative manner, but it is not clear which pejorative sense is intended, often.

Plus, isn't this just a word for the earliest twentieth-century and its attitudes?


This was fine for Cleanth Brooks or somebody annoying like that to use, but it's just not a word any serious writer of muscular prose is going to use.

It's a sissy word used by sissies to call sissies sissies.

Or it's an out of time word used by out of time people to call out of time people out of time.

That's what's wrong with "effete."



Is there a consensus that this word is "frontin?"