If I meet one more Mfalsaf...

One of the things I love about Arabic is that it has certain idioms that just hit the spot.   The idioms speak volumes about a situation or a personality often with one word.  One of these idioms is “mfalsaf” (مفلسف ) a colloquial term derived from “falsafeh” which translates to philosophy.  A person who is mfalsaf is one who dives too deeply into every argument made in their presence, squeezing every last drop of fun out of any conversation (sort of like a smart ass).  Mfalsafeen (plural) are a breed of people who I just can’t stand to be around.  Here’s why...

When a mfalsaf is around I find it very hard to converse freely.  I tiptoe around topics that I feel might induce a falsafeh diarrhea, which is pretty much impossible with a mfalsaf around.  These people are very good at what they do.   Another downfall of having a mfalsaf around is “super joke analysis”.  They can’t take a joke for what it is, they have to go into the details and tell you how it doesn’t make sense.  As if it proves their intellectual superiority if they point out “It’s impossible to be so short that you can see someone’s feet on their drivers licence... plus wouldn’t they zoom in on the face anyway?”  They are also guilty of “super Hollywood movie analysis,” they would often be heard saying “dude, it’s impossible to survive that crash, do you know how many G’s that is?  Humans can take only 5 G’s before....”

At work a mfalsaf will never answer your question. They will go into debates (often with themselves) reaching no conclusion and leaving you more confused than before you asked the questions.  If you happen to be having a conversation and they’re around they will intervene with useless, irrelevant comments, which serve only in breaking the train of thought and continuity of the conversation.  For all I know they probably have wet dreams about the number of intellectual breakthroughs they made the day before. 

A typical mfalsaf argument is “I don’t have to prove that god exists, you have to prove that he doesn’t exist”. Booooooo. Most of mfalsafs’ arguments begin with “well technically...” or “provided that...what you’re saying could be true”. Mfalsafeen are in desperate need of chill pills. 

So how o you deal with a mfalsaf? If you try to give them a taste of their own medicine they will take you on and go falsafeh diarrhea on you, and that can get messy.  If you simply agree with their argument in hopes of shutting them up, you’re encouraging them to continue their quest.  So that leaves us with the only option of ignoring them.  When they throw the “technicaly speaking” at you, you just let it slide.  They might try harder to be involved in the conversation, turn your back to them. Hopefully Pavlovian Conditioning will teach them to keep their comments to themselves.  I strongly believe that mfalsaf is a yet undiagnosed psychological syndrome, one that many engineers seem to suffer from.