What’s Afoot with Effete?

Here are five possible synonyms: (a) womanly; (b) worn out; (c) elegant; (d) snobbish; (e) pseudointellectual. Take your pick and read on. The answer may surprise you.

Effete comes from the Latin effetus, worn out by bearing children, unable to produce offspring, which comes in turn from ex-, out, and fetus, productive. Effete formerly was used of animals to mean past bearing, and of soil or land to mean barren. These applications are now uncommon, though not archaic, and today precise usage most often employs effete in the figurative sense of exhausted, having the energies worn out, barren of results, ineffective or unproductive. “If they find the old governments effete,” wrote the British statesman Edmund Burke, “they may seek new ones.” The correct answer, therefore, is (b) worn out.

Do you remember, from Level 4, my discussion of the “soundslike syndrome”? Effete is one of its victims, and its case is particularly complicated because it is commonly confused not with one but with two similar-sounding words.

The first word people confuse with effete is effeminate. Some years ago I was listening to a literary radio show hosted by a syndicated columnist. The columnist asked his guest, the author of a biography of Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone with the Wind, whether Mitchell’s fiancé was effete. Do you think she thought he meant worn out, exhausted, spent? Not for a minute. Going right along with the confusion, the biographer replied, “Yes, Mitchell’s fiancé had many effeminate qualities.”

Effeminate is a disparaging term applied to men to mean womanish, unmanly, not virile. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare writes, “A woman impudent and mannish grown/Is not more loath’d than an effeminate man.”

The second word people confuse with effete is elite (ay-LEET or i-LEET). By derivation elite means the choice or best part; the word is most often used of a group or class of persons. “The elite of society” comprises persons of the highest social class, sometimes referred to colloquially as “snobs.”

I heard a good example of the confusion between effete and elite in another radio interview, this time on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” The interviewer was speaking with the editor of the notoriously stuffy and esoteric New York Review of Books, and at one point she asked him if he thought his publication was effete. Did he think she meant exhausted, ineffective, washed up? Hardly. He replied that although the Review was highbrow fare, it did not intend to be snobbish or exclusive and was undeserving of any such reputation it might have.

For those who already think effete means womanly, delicate, or overrefined, compounding that erroneous notion with the equally erroneous suggestion of snobbery or supercilious self-indulgence requires no great leap of the imagination. For millions of Americans, the confusion of effete with elite was implanted in the 1970s by Richard M. Nixon’s otherwise unmemorable vice president, Spiro Agnew, when, in a speech assailing opponents of the Vietnam War, he uttered the words “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”

Almost overnight, “effete snob” became a catch phrase in the war controversy, used by the “hawks,” who favored involvement, to disparage the “doves,” who were against involvement. As a result of this phrase’s hasty dissemination by the media and its subsequent absorption into the nebulous national vocabulary, effete now often suggests elitism and snobbery, an association entirely divorced from its true meaning: depleted of energy or vigor, worn out.

What does it mean when some of the most prominent writers, editors, broadcasters, and politicians in the country fall prey to the “sounds-like syndrome”? Is this a Humpty Dumpty case of “a word means whatever I choose it to mean”? Should we just lie back—that’s right, lie, not lay—and say, “As long as we communicate, what difference does it make?”

That, my verbally advantaged friend, is what is called a rhetorical question, to which you already know my answer is a resounding no.

So what can we conclude is afoot with effete? Though weakened by the presence in current dictionaries of such incongruous synonyms as effeminate, decadent, degenerate, and overrefined, the precise sense of this useful word is not entirely effete, exhausted, ineffective, washed-up. Now that you know the story of how the “sounds-like syndrome” has infected effete, you must play doctor and decide how you are going to treat the word. And the next time you hear effete used effeminately, or by an impudent snob, perhaps you will pass along this word to the wise.