What is freaction?

Answer 1

I asked this very same question of my great-grandmother in 1977. She told me that matters concerning freactions were not discussed in polite company or among the well-bred. Being a curious young buck, my interest was piqued: she had added an air of scandal and titillation to a word whose meaning I didn't know and in all honesty had only learned several hours before, on a rerun of one of the final episodes of the Ed Sullivan Show. I will spare you the cumbersome details of my subsequent trips to the Bodlein Library in Oxford, my failure to capture the Porcelain Pharoah of Alexandretta, my dabblings in alchemy and development of a method for separating aqua regia from ether, the hostage-taking and negotiations in a village outside Antibes, the Quechuan poncho-weavers and their sad little dancing, my rapid ascension through the managerial ranks of a manufacturing firm based in Tashkent that was likely involved in arms-dealing, the several Papal Councils I attended as an amicus curiae, and all of the pokes I sent to persons depicted in their facebook profiles as appearing generally professorial in their garb: all of these adventures, quests, sallies, and what have you, came to nothing. After several decades and tens of thousands of dollars spent; after loves come and gone, friendships made and faded, reputations gained and sullied; after all this, a dark thought struck me, a horrible thought, a though that drew the air from my lungs and blackened my vision: (1) I had simply misspelled 'fraction', which can be easily looked up in online dictionaries and wikipedias, if not old-fashioned math texts; and (2) my great-grandmother simply hated maths, that was what the old dame's problem was. Sheesh.