F
Facilitate
Help or allow to happen.
Not everyone likes the idea of the managers and the administrators but those same people still see the need to get things done, to get them organised. Facilitation sounds a little bit better, at least it doesn’t have all those control connotations, but it is only a matter of time before we have facilitator managers, or administrative facilitators.
Fact
That which can be empirically proven.
One thing that is certain is that we need certainties in our lives. The other thing that is certain is that facts are not always fact. All too often they are personal opinions.
Fact finding mission
An attempt to accretion the extent of a situation at first hand.
Sometimes it is an admission by a politician that he might have been confused in the past. Mostly it is a gastronomic tour for visiting politicians, with the entertainment in the form of a local crisis.
Faction
A breakaway group.
We start to get the impression that people who sign up to a belief, whatever that belief, will then do anything rather than follow the actual tenets of that belief. One good way out is to start by arguing about what the Teacher actually meant. Does love actually mean ‘love’ or does it just mean ‘be nice to’? Does neighbour include people who live in the next town, people with black skins, women, men who love other men? There will be supporters of each of these options, and the supporters can then form themselves into factions in order to fight with the other factions. Cleaver isn’t it? Jesus didn’t actually say ‘Love thy neighbour.’ What he actually said was ‘Go to war about it’ and of that all the factions are agreed.
Faith
A form of belief.
Faith doesn’t seem to need empirical evidence, just a hole in your life that it can crawl into. Faith is very comfortable because it doesn’t need a lot of intellectual effort. People with faith will rarely argue their cause, they simply shout about it. A lot of religious people have faith, which is not surprising since their religious texts offer so little in the way of proof.
Family
A group of blood relatives.
A family can consist of just two persons, one parent and one child, and it probably functions best when it does. In other cases families do have a habit of falling out with each other, often with disastrous results. And we are told that, in America, the family that prays together stays together, which is lucky for the Americans. In other parts of the world, where they presumably do less praying, the family has been seen as a primary exercise in neo-fascism.
Fan club
A free association of people who are devoted to something, or someone.
Members of fan clubs don’t need faith. All they need is a photograph then they can masturbate to their heart’s content, which is something else people with faith probably don’t do a lot of.
Fantasy
An exercise of the imagination.
People often seem to be more willing to believe in fantasy than they are in fact, this is probably because fantasy is more fun. It starts out as a desire to believe that religious leaders or politicians are capable of telling the truth. It becomes a literary genre written by people with little imagination, mostly about women who wear leather costumes and carry large swords. It ends up as a style of football which is marginally more interesting than that played by twenty two men in shorts. Fantasy, as you can see, requires very little effort.
Farmer
An agriculturist.
A politician who understands pig shit, or a country dweller who lives on state handouts but can still afford green wellingtons.
Fashion
The prevailing style or mode.
Fashion is somewhat similar to economics. Everyone likes to think that it is controlled by natural forces. No one is willing to admit that someone, somewhere, sat down and made a decision which was in his own best interest. Fashion is the denial of historical inevitability, or that which enslaves all.
Fatherhood
The condition of being the male parent of a child.
A thing which bothers a lot of men is that they have so little involvement in the pregnancy, just five seconds of active participation often followed by a lifetime of denial. At best fatherhood is the condition of not using a condom, at worst a matter of involuntary sperm donation. See also mother, parent.
Feedback
Response to a statement.
There is nothing the creative artist likes to hear better than to hear good reports about their work, but they rarely do. What they get instead is feedback, which they then put down to the drunken ramblings of someone who did not like their work in the first place. Feedback is a form of criticism but mostly it is negative criticism.
Feminism
The politics of femininity.
Some men are afraid of spiders but are rarely willing to talk about it. A lot of men are afraid of feminism and talk about it often. It becomes an insult used by a man to a woman when he is afraid to accuse her of active homosexuality. It is a creed which breeds a fear, in men, that women may have rights or even be equal.
Film
A thin coating of moisture on a surface.
Someone once put a thin film of chemical on a sheet of glass, and thus was photography born. Someone else discovered a way of animating those photographs but the end result was still called film because it still involved a thin coating of a chemical on a surface. Later still the genre became divided; there were movies, which were easily forgotten, and there was film which the academics talked about endlessly, but by now they were talking about shadows on a screen rather than a thin coating of moisture on a surface.
First World
A loose term for Europe, the Americas and Australasia.
That part of the world which, historically, came last in the development chain. America is not to be confused with the first world as a whole, though it is an implicit statement in much American thinking. In fact America was the last country to join the first world, and it shows. See also third world and free world.
First World War
, The A major conflict between the European nations in the early part of the Twentieth Century. It was called the war to end all wars, until the next one came along. In fact it was a family argument between European royalty which devastated the youth of Europe who were not members of any royal family. See also Second World War, obscenity.Flag
A banner.
Another substitute for faith, or belief, or even rational thought. In some countries it is a criminal offence to insult the flag but not to insult citizens of that country who have the wrong colour skin. A flag is a pretty coloured piece of cloth, the pity is that what it represents is not always so nice.
Flat pack furniture
Self assembly furniture sold in diy stores.
The politics of capitalism demands that consumers keep consuming, even when they have all the basic necessities of life. This is easy enough with clothes, they either wear out or they go out of fashion, usually within a year. With furniture it is somewhat harder and thus was the concept of the flat pack developed, a self assembly furniture packs from which the only things missing are the instructions and the last screw, thus ensuring it will fall apart within the year.
Fly on the wall
An insect on the vertical surface of a room.
We don’t see a fly on the wall so we don’t know if it is listening, unlike the cat who always makes a big show of listening. Fly on the wall is a style of television documentary where the participants are forced to pretend that they do not know that there is a whole production crew (the flies) following them rather than a cat getting under their feet all the time. See also reality television.
Focus group
A technique used by advertising and public relations agencies to discover what the public are thinking.
A chance to spend an evening drinking wine, and talking nonsense, and not having to pick up the bill for either.
Folk music
The music of the people.
A style of music which may have been popular, in it’s time, but has since been made unpopular by the efforts of those who perform and support it. Or simply bad songs listened to while drinking worse beer. Not to be confused with traditional music.
Food
Edible substances necessary to the maintenance of life.
Everyone needs it, not everyone gets enough of it, other people turn it into a religion. Food is the ultimate product for the greedy capitalist intent on trapping us into continuous consumerism. Food wont even stay with us. It goes in, it comes out, and very shortly after we are hungry again. Food, in the end, is the pre-requisite of washing up.
Food chain
The dependency of one animal on the one below for it’s food, right up to the human being. It is known that big fleas have little fleas and it is even possible that the big fleas eat the little fleas. Man like to think of himself as being at the top of the pecking order, and is certainly at the top of the eating order, but when he eats a cow he conveniently forgets what the cow might have eaten before, or how many fleas there are in his daily diet, or just how much shit goes into the making of his daily diet.Football
A game played between two teams of eleven, and concerning the possession of one ball.
An interactive game which pre-dates the invention of the Playstation, but also a national sport, therefore an activity which will take people’s minds off what the Government is doing. Men don’t go to football matches to watch the game, there is hardly anything of interest anyway, they go there to shout and throw bottles so it also provides training sessions for police riot squads.
Footballer
A man who wears shorts and chases a ball.
He is a media personality who speaks entirely in mixed metaphors. He is a sports personality who hardly ever represents the town, area, or country in which he was born, and is paid large sums of money in recognition of this. He is a public figure who is allowed to kiss other men, publicly.
Forgiveness
A form of amnesty.
Christianity has a God who forgives everything, which is only right since She was the cause of everything to start with. On a more immediate level, when we forgive someone it is a recognition that they have had an effect on our lives, or the final proof that we were right all the time. It most cases it is also a highly aggressive act since it leaves us with such a smug feeling of superiority.
Free
Without cost or restriction.
In marketing terms this is an additional quantity of a product which you will pay for in some other way, and for which you have no option of refusing.
Freedom
A lack of restrictions.
Now that one is a wonderful coin to desire, but a difficult one to spend. It is anything which society permits, but non of what it does not permit. It is the decision to think and act rather than the right to think and act. In some political creeds it is also the right to be abusive to others, the deny the basic freedoms of others.
Free enterprise
Trading without restrictions.
A system of controls and regulations designed to ensure that only those who support the Government will survive in business. It is greed, when made respectable, but in Russia it is the freedom to sell shoe laces on the street corner while in America it is a creed which creates holy men without the aid of religion, as you would expect.
Free world
Those countries which are ruled by democracies.
This is basically the same as the first world but there are those who suspect that it is a description for countries who have been ‘liberated’ by America.
Friendship
A relationship which is not sexual or of the blood.
Some people ask God to protect them from their friends, which is understandable considering that it is a conspiracy of those who understand our failings. By rights it should mean the having common interests rather than active genitals, a freedom from obligation to another person, an alternative to paying debts.
Fundamentalist
One who believes in absolute basics.
The way to insult some Christians is to call them a fundamentalist, one who has belief rather than grounds for belief, and that is odd since it describes the basic requirement of affiliation to any religion. In truth a fundamentalist is one who can not get his nose off the ground or his eyes off his neighbours backside, one who’s belief system is founded on bigotry towards others.
Future
That which is not the present or the past.
A time when anything is possible, provided you believe what you have just been told today. In other words a time when you will have enough money to survive, when you will be sober, when you will have a lover, etc. etc.
