| 单词 | effete |
| 例句 | effete adjective 1.•effete trendies:affected, pretentious, precious, mannered, overrefined | ineffectual | informal la-di-da. ANT unpretentious. 2.•an effete young man:effeminate, unmanly, girlish, feminine | soft, timid, cowardly, lily-livered, spineless, pusillanimous | informal sissy, wimpish, wimpy. ANT manly. 3.•the fabric of society is effete:weak, enfeebled, enervated, worn out, exhausted, finished, drained, spent, powerless, ineffectual. ANT powerful.WORD NOTE effete Here's a word on which some dictionaries and usage authorities haven't caught up with the realities of literate usage. Yes, the traditional meaning of effete is "depleted of vitality, washed out, exhausted"—and in a college paper for an older prof you'd probably want to use it in only that way. But a great many educated people accept effete now also as a pejorative synonym for elite or elitist, one with an added suggestion of effeminacy, over-refinement, pretension, and/or decadence; and in these writers' opinion it is not a boner to use effete this way, since no other word has quite its connotative flavor. Traditionalists who see this evolved definition as an error often blame Spiro Agnew's characterization of some liberal group or other as an "effete corps of impudent snobs," but there are deeper reasons for this evolution, such as that effete derives from the Latin effētus, which meant "worn out from bearing children" and thus had an obvious feminine connotation. Or that, historically, effete was often used to describe artistic movements that had exhausted their vitality, and one of the main characteristics of a kind of art's exhaustion was its descent into excessive refinement/foppery/decadence. — DFW & EMConversational, opinionated, and idiomatic, these Word Notes are an opportunity to see a working writer's perspective on a particular word or usage.WORD NOTE See |
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