Sep 29, 2024 · Feckless describes people or things that are weak or ineffective. // The agency’s response to the dramatic increase in air pollution was well-intentioned but ultimately feckless.

Aug 11, 2024 · To vitiate something is, essentially, to mar or damage it in some way, whether by ruining or spoiling it ("a joke vitiated by poor timing"), corrupting it morally ("a mind vitiated by prejudice"), or …

6 days ago · This sense carried over into English as well, and so in some contexts nugatory means “ineffective” or “having no force,” as when Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson …

Nov 8, 2025 · A bromide is a statement so worn and trite as to be ineffective when it’s offered to make someone feel better. Before the sigh-inducing type, though, bromides were most familiar in …

Jan 9, 2026 · Innocuous is rooted in a lack of harm: it comes from the Latin adjective innocuus, which was formed by combining the negative prefix in- with a form of the verb nocēre, meaning “to harm” or …

Oct 16, 2020 · In 1827, English author Robert Southey found use for the word by blending it into utilitarian to form futilitarian, a word that is used for anyone who believes that human striving is …

Nov 24, 2023 · “It looks like Pa isn't anything like the nebbish Ma is always making him out to be.” Sounds like poor Pa got a bum rap, at least according to a 1951 book review that appeared in The …

Feb 28, 2023 · Stultify means “to cause someone or something to become dull or ineffective.” // With a government as stultified by bureaucracy as that one, even the simplest records request can take weeks.

Oct 21, 2024 · What It Means Intransigent is a formal word that describes a person who refuses to compromise or abandon an often extreme position or attitude. It can also describe a thing, such as a …

Jun 12, 2024 · If you guesstimate that efficacious is the effect of combining effective with the suffix -ious, you’re on the right track. Efficacious came to English from the Middle French word efficace (or that