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?
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.

In any case not identifying peoples' names unnecessarily might just help reduce the nuisance caused by spam merchants of all kinds, including get-rich-quick advisors, chain letter writers, pedlars of spurious genealogies, mystic philosophy wallahs, porn merchants, prostitutes, God-botherers, charities, and downright crazies, perverts and crooks.

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 you might like. 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... 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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