fainéant •
\fay-nay-AHN\ • adjective : idle and
ineffectual : indolent
Examples: Deanna's
parents warned her not to become fainéant during the summer; even if she didn't
want to work, she should travel or volunteer
somewhere.
"We go on,
Beckett-like, enacting the rituals that define existence, trapped in an
existential spiral, too fainéant to change, ... doomed to repeat the same
mistakes and fall into the same situations." — David Krasner, A History of Modern Drama, 2011
Did you know? You've
probably guessed that fainéant was borrowed from French; it derives from
fait-nient, which literally means "does nothing," and ultimately
traces back to the verb faindre, or feindre, meaning "to feign." (The
English word feign is also descended from this verb, as are faint and feint.)
Fainéant first appeared in print in the early 17th century as a noun meaning
"an irresponsible idler," and by 1854 it was also being used as an
adjective. As its foreignness suggests, fainéant tends to be used when the
context calls for a fancier or
more
elegant word than inactive or sluggish.
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