Definify.com
Webster 1913 Edition
Forcible-feeble
For′ci-ble-feeˊble
,Adj.
[From
Feeble
, a character in the Second Part of Shakespeare’s “King Henry IV.,” to whom Falstaff derisively applies the epithet “forcible
.”] Seemingly vigorous, but really weak or insipid.
He [Prof. Ayton] would purge his book of much offensive matter, if he struck out epithets which are in the bad taste of the
forcible-feeble
school. N. Brit. Review.
Definition 2024
forcible-feeble
forcible-feeble
English
Alternative forms
- forcible-Feeble
Adjective
forcible-feeble (comparative more forcible-feeble, superlative most forcible-feeble)
- 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, 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 […]
- 1850, The North British Review (volumes 13-14, page 2)