fmap'ping a function over a structure can alternatively be thought of as raising a unary function ( a -- b ) to a higher level of abstraction ( M-a -- M-b ).
Applicative functors extend this notion to functions of any arity. The lift/<$>words perform the same lazy "raising" as fmap while preserving function input order. This lifted, partially applied function can then be collapsed to a value by applying inputs through the reify/<*> words.
Unlike in e.g. Haskell, <$> is not a direct alias of fmap, as Factor's stack based nature means that using fmap directly for applicative style code would result in inputs being reversed.