Jester's Condescending English Dictionary - F
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
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| F (forte or loud) | n | The neighbours are out. See also P, Crescendo, PP and FF |
| FF | n | To hell with the neighbours. See also P, F, Crescendo and PP |
| Fairy Tale | n | A horror story to prepare children for the newspapers. |
| Faith | n | That quality which enables us to believe what we know to be untrue. |
| Fakir | n | A psychologist whose charismatic data have inspired almost religious devotion in his followers, even though the sources seem to have shinnied up a rope and vanished. |
| falsie salesman | n | Fuller bust man. |
| Famous last words | pl, n | (1) "Don't worry, I can handle it." (2) "You and what army?" (3) "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be a cop." (4) Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix. (5) Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there. (6) What happens if you touch these two wires tog-- (7) We won't need reservations. (8) It's always sunny there this time of the year. (9) Don't worry, it's not loaded. (10) They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager. (11) Don't worry! Women love it! |
| Famous quotations | pl, n | " " -- Charlie Chaplin " " -- Harpo Marx " " -- Marcel Marceau |
| Famous | adj | Conspicuously miserable. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| Fastidious | adj | A girl who is both fast and hideous. |
| Faucet | n | What you have to do if the tap won't turn. |
| feature | n | A surprising property of a program. Occasionaly documented. To call a property a feature sometimes means the author did not consider that case, and the program makes an unexpected, though not necessarily wrong response. See BUG. "That's not a bug, it's a feature!" A bug can be changed to a feature by documenting it. |
| felt tip | v | Past tense for a breast examination! |
| female | n | Life support system for a p****. See also Male (2) |
| Female rabbits | pl, n | The gift that just "keeps on giving." |
| Feminism | n | A political position which seeks to rebuild society so that both men and women are treated as women wish to be treated. |
| fenderberg | n | The large glacial deposits that form on the insides of car fenders during snowstorms. -- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends |
| Ferguson's Precept | n | A crisis is when you can't say "let's forget the whole thing." |
| Fete | n | A boring picnic worse than death. |
| Fibula | n | A small lie |
| Fidelity | n | A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed. |
| Fifth Law of Applied Terror | n | If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book. Corollary: If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live. |
| Fifth Law of Procrastination | n | Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do. |
| File cabinet | n | A four drawer, manually activated trash compactor. |
| filibuster | n | Throwing your wait around. |
| Finagle's Creed | n | Science is true. Don't be misled by facts. |
| Finagle's First Law | n | To study a subject best, understand it thoroughly before you start. |
| Finagle's Second Law | n | Always keep a record of data -- it indicates you've been working. |
| Finagle's Third Law | n | In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake Corollaries: (1) Nobody whom you ask for help will see it. (2) The first person who stops by, whose advice you really don't want to hear, will see it immediately. |
| Finagle's Fourth Law | n | Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it worse. |
| Finagle's Fifth Law | n | Always draw your curves, then plot your readings. |
| Finagle's Sixth Law | n | Don't believe in miracles -- rely on them. |
| Finagle's Seventh Law | n | The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum. |
| Finagle's Eighth Law | n | If an experiment works, something has gone wrong. |
| Finagle's Ninth Law | n | No matter what results are expected, someone is always willing to fake it. |
| Finagle's Tenth Law | n | No matter what the result someone is always eager to misinterpret it. |
| Finagle's Eleventh Law | n | No matter what occurs, someone believes it happened according to his pet theory. |
| Fine | n | A tax for doing wrong. See also Tax |
| Fine's Corollary | n | Functionality breeds Contempt. |
| Finster's Law | n | A closed mouth gathers no feet. |
| The First Commandment for Technicians | n | Beware the lightning that lurketh in the undischarged capacitor, lest it cause thee to bounce upon thy buttocks in a most untechnician-like manner. |
| First Law of Bicycling | n | No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the wind. |
| First law of debate | n | Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference. |
| First Law of Procrastination | n | Procrastination shortens the job and places the responsibility for its termination on someone else (i.e., the authority who imposed the deadline). |
| Fifth Law of Procrastination | n | Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do. |
| First Law of Socio-Genetics | n | Celibacy is not hereditary. |
| First Rule of History | n | History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other. |
| Fishbowl | n | A glass-enclosed isolation cell where newly promoted managers are kept for observation. |
| Five rules for eternal misery | pl, n | (1) Always try to exhort others to look upon you favorably. (2) Make lots of assumptions about situations and be sure to treat these assumptions as though they are reality. (3) Then treat each new situation as though it's a crisis. (4) Live in the past and future only (become obsessed with how much better things might have been or how much worse things might become). (5) Occasionally stomp on yourself for being so stupid as to follow the first four rules. |
| Fixed | n | Will never ever vary. -- Good News Week *2 |
| flannister | n | The plastic yoke that holds a six-pack of beer together. -- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends |
| Flirt | n | A girl whose favorite man is the next one. |
| Flon's Law | n | There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs. |
| FloppyDisc | v | What you get lifting too much firewood. See also Log On, Log Off, Monitor and Download |
| flowchart | n & v | [From flow "to ripple down in rich profusion, as hair" + chart "a cryptic hidden-treasure map designed to mislead the uninitiated."] 1. n. The solution, if any, to a class of Mascheroni construction problems in which given algorithms require geometrical representation using only the 35 basic ideograms of the ANSI template. 2. n. Neronic doodling while the system burns. 3. n. A low-cost substitute for wallpaper. 4. n. The innumerate misleading the illiterate. "A thousand pictures is worth ten lines of code." -- The Programmer's Little Red Vade Mecum, Mao Tse T'umps. 5. v.intrans. To produce flowcharts with no particular object in mind. 6. v.trans. To obfuscate (a problem) with esoteric cartoons. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" |
| Flugg's Law | n | When you need to knock on wood is when you realize that the world is composed of vinyl, naugahyde and aluminum. |
| Fog Lamps | pl, n | Excessively (often obnoxiously) bright lamps mounted on the fronts of automobiles; used on dry, clear nights to indicate that the driver's brain is in a fog. See also "Idiot Lights". |
| Foolproof Operation | n | No provision for adjustment. |
| Forecast | n | A prediction of the future, based on the past, for which the forecaster demands payment in the present. |
| Forgetfulness | n | A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience. |
| Fornicat | n | A promiscuous pussy. |
| fornication | n | Term used by people who don't have anybody to screw with. |
| four-bag ugly | adj | When you leave a bag by the door in case someone drops by. See also three-bag ugly |
| Fourth Law of Applied Terror | n | The night before the English History mid-term, your Biology instructor will assign 200 pages on planaria. Corollary: Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do except study for that instructor's course. |
| Fourth Law of Revision | n | It is usually impractical to worry beforehand about interferences -- if you have none, someone will make one for you. |
| Fourth Law of Thermodynamics | n | If the probability of success is not almost one, it is damn near zero. -- David Ellis |
| Fresco's Discovery | n | If you knew what you were doing you'd probably be bored. |
| Fried's 1st Rule | n | Increased automation of clerical function invariably results in increased operational costs. |
| Friends | pl, n | People who borrow your books and set wet glasses on them. People who know you well, but like you anyway. |
| Frisbeetarianism | n | The belief that when you die, your soul goes up the on roof and gets stuck. |
| Frobnicate | v | To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. Derived from FROBNITZ. Usually abbreviated to FROB. Thus one has the saying "to frob a frob." See TWEAK and TWIDDLE. Usage: FROB, TWIDDLE, and TWEAK sometimes connote points along a continuum. FROB connotes aimless manipulation; TWIDDLE connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; TWEAK connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it. |
| Frobnitz | n | pl. Frobnitzem An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers to electronic black boxes. This rare form is usually abbreviated to FROTZ, or more commonly to FROB. Also used are FROBNULE, FROBULE, and FROBNODULE. Starting perhaps in 1979, FROBBOZ (fruh-bahz'), pl. FROBBOTZIM, has also become very popular, largely due to its exposure via the Adventure spin-off called Zork (Dungeon). These can also be applied to non-physical objects, such as data structures. |
| Fuch's Warning | n | If you actually look like your passport photo, you aren't well enough to travel. |
| f***-me-pumps | n | Stiletto heels of a certain length, usually black patent leather. The proper designation is "throw-me-down-and-f***-me" pumps. Shoes with heels just high enough to let the frayed tip of a bullwhip trail around them properly. |
| f*** off | n | The tie breaker at the Miss America Beauty Pageant. |
| Fudd's First Law of Opposition | n | Push something hard enough and it will fall over. |
| Fun experiment | n | Get a can of shaving cream, throw it in a freezer for about a week. Then take it out, peel the metal off and put it where you want... bedroom, car, etc. As it thaws, it expands an unbelievable amount. |
| furbling | v | Having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank even when you are the only person in line. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" |
