How "Fail" Went From Verb to Interjection

[babylonsister]

How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection

By BEN ZIMMER
Published: August 7, 2009




Spend some time on the Internet, and you’ll start to see a peculiar usage of the word fail popping up everywhere. A conservative blog posts an image of a United States-Russian diplomatic agreement with the president’s name spelled “Barak Obama” and calls it “White House Spellcheck FAIL.” Atlanta Braves fans take out their ire on outfielder Jeff Francoeur (since traded to the New York Mets) by changing his name to “Failcoeur.” On Twitter, disgruntled CNN-watchers complain about the network’s coverage of protests in Iran under the banner “CNNfail.”

Time was, fail was simply a verb that denoted being unsuccessful or falling short of expectations. It made occasional forays into nounhood, in fixed expressions like without fail and no-fail. That all started to change in certain online subcultures about six years ago. In July 2003, a contributor to Urbandictionary.com noted that fail could be used as an interjection “when one disapproves of something,” giving the example: “You actually bought that? FAIL.” This punchy stand-alone fail most likely originated as a shortened form of “You fail” or, more fully, “You fail it,” the taunting “game over” message in the late-’90s Japanese video game Blazing Star, notorious for its fractured English.

In a few years’ time, the use of fail as an interjection caught on to such an extent that particularly egregious objects of ridicule required an even stronger barb: major fail, überfail, massive fail or, most popular of all, epic fail. The intensifying adjectives hinted that fail was becoming a new kind of noun: not simply a synonym for failure but, rather, a derisive label to slap on a miscue that is eminently mockable in its stupidity or wrongheadedness. Online cynics deploy fail as a countable noun (“That’s such a fail!”) and also as a mass noun that treats failure as an abstract quality: the offending party is often said to be full of fail or made of fail.

A major vehicle for the success of fail has been FAIL Blog, a Web site set up in January 2008 and acquired a few months later by Pet Holdings, a blog conglomerate that has had great success with I Can Has Cheezburger? — the foremost purveyor of “lolcats,” a popular genre of humorous cat photos in which superimposed captions sport playfully poor grammar and spelling.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/magazine/09FOB-onlanguage-t.html

[moggie]

1. Article fail

Leaving aside how late the NY Times is at documenting this meme (look out, next week they'll cover "all your base"), how could they have a whole article on fail without a single mention of win?

[babylonsister]

2. Do inform me when 'win' was used as 'fail' is. I must have missed that. nt

[CoffeeCat]

4. FTW! (nt)

[babylonsister]

5. ??

Would that be applied to sports? I'm talking about on boards like this. I don't recall seeing that. :shrug:

[SIMPLYB1980]

6. Not to bring up the primaries but...

[moggie]

10. How about this?

Car fail = baboon win:



Some would say that every fail has an equal and opposite win, depending on how you look at it.

[Edweird]

13. I was thinking of an entirely different 'win'.

[CoffeeCat]

3. LOL...

"all your base".

I absolutely love it when people pack so much punch into a sentence or two.

Great points, and I LOL when I read "all your base".

I read your sentence aloud to my husband (who is painting the kitchen) and he thought it was brilliant (and witty) too.

[Cirque du So-What]

8. When Boston was on top of the sports world a couple years ago

a Beantown friend of mine had as his sig

'all your sports championship are belong to us'

I thought it was a very witty variation on the 'all your base' theme.

[Edweird]

12. It's the clueless trying to appear worldly to the even more clueless.

[BumRushDaShow]

7. Thanks for posting!

I have been a bit fascinated by the internet slang use of the term (and use it myself of late). Sometimes little trivia articles like this break up an otherwise emotional and frustrating period of discourse. It's funny but I dropped off my Sat. NY Times (and the Sunday half with the magazine), to my mother yesterday so it'll be interesting to see if she noticed this little article if it is in the edition that I got (she's a non-internet user).

[SoCalDem]

9. I seriously LOVE "teh FAIL"

I have a gallery of 'em



FAIL

[cliffordu]

11. My favorites: