Effete vs Decadent - What's the difference?
effete | decadent |
(label) Of substances, quantities etc: exhausted, spent, worn-out.
*, II.4.1.v:
Of people: lacking strength or vitality; feeble, powerless, impotent.
*
Decadent, weak through self-indulgence.
Effeminate.
*
Characterized by moral or cultural decline.
* - The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992)
Luxuriously self-indulgent.
* "
As adjectives the difference between effete and decadent
is that effete is (label) of substances, quantities etc: exhausted, spent, worn-out while decadent is decadent.effete
English
Alternative forms
*Adjective
(en adjective)- Nature is not effœte , as he saith, or so lavish, to bestow all her gifts upon an age, but hath reserved some for posterity, to shew her power, that she is still the same, and not old or consumed.
- Amid the effete monarchies and princedoms of feudal Europe, morally and materially exhausted by the Thirty Years' War, the only hope of resistance to France lay in the little Republic of merchants, Holland.
- a good-humored, effete boy brought up by maiden aunts.
Derived terms
* effetely * effetenessdecadent
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
- Surgery in an opera? How wonderfully decadent ! And just as I was beginning to lose interest!