This morning we will be exploring two concepts that begin with the letter “F”.
Daily Post readers who may be squeamish about words that begin with the letter “F” are advised to bail out right now… perhaps by returning to the Daily Post Home Page, here, where you can find a sizable number of articles that avoid “F Words” entirely…
…or alternatively, you can visit the NOAA Weather Forecast page, here, where the only prominent “F Word” is “Forecast”.
I imagine many readers — who, like me, are non-skiers — spent the snowy weekend in a state of relative idleness, wondering what the world is coming to, and – like me — ran across the January 17 op-ed article in the Washington Post, by Amanda Katz, discussing the FAFO Effect.
Reportedly, the FAFO Effect was first noticed by Google in about 2004, when people started searching for the term “FAFO” and discovered that the acronym stands for “Fuck Around, Find Out.”
The initial interest in the term “FAFO” dropped off somewhat between 2010 and 2020 (according to Google Trends) but for some reason, people started searching for the term more frantically in March 2020, just as the COVID pandemic was blanketing the globe with its unique blend of fear and idleness.
The term was more fully explained, and given some much-needed respectability, in a one-minute TikTok video posted by analyst Roger Skaer in 2022.
Mr. Skaer’s analysis implies the main purpose of ‘fucking around’ is to ‘find out’ something… that ‘finding out’ is in fact the goal of ‘fucking around’.
Often, we find out things because our wives explain them to us. Curiously enough, wives don’t have to fuck around to find out things; they simply observe their husbands.
But there are situations where the temptation to fuck around is simply too hard to resist, regardless of wifely input. And then, we find out.
Certain scientists have started applying the acronym to research projects, as suggested by the following graphic:
By layering FAFO with Latin-derived terms like ‘Hypothesis’, the scientists are able to make the act of fucking around seem reputable.
For normal people, however, the term “fuck around” implies a relatively aimless, casual activity where no specific result is expected. Typically, the activity is not only aimless, but would likely be considered a waste of time by an intelligent person.
To find out that this is what scientists have been doing with their government grants will no doubt strike some Daily Post readers as surprising. As it did me.
A more common interpretation is that a person who ‘fucks around’ will ultimately ‘find out’ something they didn’t expect to discover — and the discovery is likely to be unpleasant. While this is certainly a less scientific interpretation, the fact remains that most of us are not scientists, doing experiments. We find out things by accident. By fucking around.
Humans are not the only animals that engage in FAFO behaviors. In fact, my cat Roscoe spends much of his day finding out stuff.
If the theory of evolution holds any water, FAFO is an evolved survival mechanism that, over the past 10,000 years, resulted in a number of “F Word” discoveries.
Fire. Farming. Fermentation. Fertilizer. Flooring. Fortunetelling. Florida. The Federal Reserve. Ford Trucks.
Not all necessarily ‘good’ discoveries. When you fuck around, you find out what you find out.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.