FAF, or faff, is a word that I have found in common usage among outdoor clubs. Faffing is the process of wasting time or being unnecessarily slow and delaying the group you're with. Faffers are those who faff habitually and are almost always late. It's a word well-suited to such clubs and I rarely encountered it anywhere else. This—I thought—was because of the word's origins. FAF was first introduced to me as an acronym standing for F**k Around Factor. I accepted the etymology then and thought no more on the matter, until I decided to look it up in a dictionary. Why I thought it would even be listed remains a mystery to this day, but still I checked and discovered—not "FAF" as I had sought—an entry for "faff" instead.
The OED defines faff as a verb meaning to fuss or to dither. It traces its usage back to 1874 and its etymology back even further to faffle, whose use was recorded in Manipulus Vocabulorum* in 1570. Clearly faff had more history than I had suspected. I thought little more of the matter then, apart from now considering it usable in polite company†.
But there's more to faff than I'd first thought. Faff is a verb (or "doing word," as my few school-level grammar lessons quite inadequately described them). As well as their shared semantic (meaning-based) traits, verbs share morphological (form-based) and syntactic (structural) traits. This isn't a lesson on verbs (a word class that I'm only beginning to understand), so I'll ignore almost all the traits of verbs and focus on one in particular. In English, verbs cannot be preceded by articles (eg. the, a, an). Articles precede nouns, not verbs. Try saying a few and see how they sound.
"I can write a sentence," sounds fine, but "and the result is the write I have made" does not. Similarly, "I could edit that last sentence to be grammatically correct," sounds fine—if a little formal—but "and the result would be an edit I have made" sounds... fine actually, overly formal but not wrong, per se. That's odd.
So, verbs can't be preceded by articles, except where—apparently—they can. In these cases, the verb is being used as a noun. These are a form of nominalization, where non-nouns can be used as nouns. What does this have to do with faff? Faff may be defined as a verb, but it's now double-timing as a noun on the side. If I faff around all morning, the faff that results can be overwhelming. This all seems like a pretty long-winded way of getting to the point, but I'm talking about wasting time so that seems appropriate.
What does this have to do with this post's title? Gerunds are a particular type of nominalization (specifically, non-finite verb phrases than can be used as noun phrases). They appear in several languages and are pretty easy to spot in English. Just keep an eye out for nouns that look suspiciously like verbs in the perfect participle (also known as the present participle). What am I talking about? Basically, verbs that end in -ing: I am running (verb) more since being inspired by watching the running (noun) last week. Keep an ear out for them next time you're waiting for people to stop faffing about; they're actually pretty common.
* Manipulus Vocabulorum, published in 1570, is a dictionary of Latin and English that was the first dictionary to organise words by rhyme. Despite the claim that Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, was the first monolingual dictionary (that is, it lists words from a language along with definitions written in that same language), Manipulus Vocabulorum includes a section that gives English definitions for English words.
† I was once asked what FAF meant by someone to whom the definition as I knew it would have been terribly offensive. Suffice to say, I'm more than happy to give the definition of faff if requested.
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