FAQs and Figments

Your questions answered

What's a FAQ?
What you've just said is a FAQ.

I said 'What's a FAQ?
I heard you, and what you said is a FAQ.

I don't understand. Will you stop playing games?
A FAQ is a Frequently Asked Question and 'What's a FAQ?' is itself a FAQ. There's probably some techincal term for it, a 'recursive' something maybe... Have you got any other questions?

Yes, what's the name of this family?
I'm not going to tell you that.

Why not?
Several reasons.

To protect the innocent. To protect the guilty. To discourage the various kinds of nerds, nutters and nuisances that infest the Web from bothering us.

People like insurance salesmen and double-glazing vendors who always ring up just as you're starting a meal, making love, getting into the bath or sitting on the toilet.

Also get-rich-quick advisors, chain letter writers, junk mail posters, pedlars of spurious genealogies, mystic philosophy wallahs, porn merchants, prostitutes, God-botherers, charities, and downright crazies, perverts and crooks.

In any case if you belong to the family you already know the name. If you don't you don't need to. It won't make the site one jot more interesting. There are no celebrities here.

What's a figment, then?
The dictionary says its something invented or made up.

You mean it's not true? You're just making it all up? It's not history but fiction?
No, no. It's all true enough. But like any history it's based on inadequate evidence, mostly other people's accounts:

• Often fragmentary and second or third hand
• Filtered through faulty memory and wishful thinking
• Influenced in unknown ways by motives ranging from spite to boastfulness

Besides as soon as you view the past from a present-day perspective you distort it. You can bet that that's not how it looked to the people concerned. The reader has to bear this sort of thing in mind.

So while it's true enough, certainly not deliberate lies or fictions, it's not quite as true as one might wish. And it never will be, because there's never an end to what more it would be nice to know.

The best that can be done is to keep correcting faulty or misleading evidence, having more voices and so on, to get a better picture. I could go on about all history being mythology... But I won't.

No, please don't do that. Tell me something else. Don't you think you've been patronising about the (few) women you've mentioned? Charming and delightful, indeed! In fact aren't you a bit of a male chauvinist?
If I were I would probably have asked you whether you are male or female by now. You're beginning to sound like a woman. And don't forget I can write you out of this script with the click of a mouse if I want to. But you do have a point.

Let me try to explain. I was just being polite and even-handed. Also I don't really know enough about either brother's wife or family (even my wife's) to say anything without getting it wrong.

So I'm hoping they will contribute something, if only a sketch of their families of origin and some impressions of ours. That way the reader can better judge them on the charming and delightful (C&D) scale and I hope get a more accurate picture all round. This goes back to what I was saying about history...

OK, OK... I get your drift.'Let a hundred flowers bloom...'. Oh my God. What the hell's that?
I don't know but I don't like the look of it. For God's sake don't tease it! It might be wise to move on.

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