 In our last issue, among other things, I failed to make my point about the potential pitfalls of abbreviating "failure" as "fail"; instead, I inspired some of our faithful readers to write in and explain that the use of "fail" as a short form of "failure" is "nearly always a joke," in the words of Texas-bred Seattleite Alex O'Neal, my favorite taxonomist, who also happens to be a Web-experience strategist and writer.
Alex went on to illuminate: "The original point of the joke was that 'fail' was a failure of English ... The word was misused in a Japanese video game that used poor English, and the joking usage spread among game and software geeks. Since the poor grammar is the joke, it doesn't make sense to criticize it."
New Yorker (and erstwhile Harvard Crimson proofreader and writer) Esther Dyson likewise pointed out that this usage "has its own special resonance," while one of my copywriting heroes, Kelly Parkinson of Copylicious in San Francisco, piped up: "I think I still love 'fail.' I can't read it without thinking of lolcats and I Can Has Cheezburger? It's become a meme that refers to itself infinitely."
It's here that I must confess: I am, in fact, familiar with the FAIL Blog, which was acquired shortly after it appeared by the same folks who pioneered I Can Has Cheezburger? I was being disingenuous when I wrote, "If you regularly use 'fail' instead of 'failure,' please tell me why." I do know why — and I apologize for suggesting otherwise. Furthermore, I can see how it might be humorous to label some unfortunate event an "epic fail."
The point I failed to make was that it apparently isn't stopping there; I'm concerned about the impressionable youths (and not so youths) for whom "fail" is becoming just a shortened form of "failure."
I wonder if "invite" — an abbreviated form of "invitation" — is also becoming the norm. You can imagine my horror when I recently walked into a branch of Chase (not that walking in there isn't horror enough) and laid eyes on their latest slogan: "Save is the new spend."
"There's a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience." The extremely learned yet down to earth Ben Zimmer, of visualthesaurus.com and the New York Times Magazine "On Language" column, noted in his illuminating piece on "fail": "Popular usage will, of course, be the ultimate arbiter of the durability of fail. One sign of fail's staying power is that it has already made the move from noun to adjective in some circles. Karl Hagen, who teaches test-preparation classes for Elite Educational Institute in Los Angeles, recently overheard a student who had done poorly on a quiz say to his friends, 'I'm so fail.'"
Slate writer Christopher Beam's take on the topic also failed to reassure me. "Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies," he averred. "But there's evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it's easier to say than failure … And there's a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience." Heedless truncation be not proud.
I fear it's a slippery slope from Internet meme to what the kids are saying to designation as an acceptable variation in the OED. As I wrote to Alex: "Apologies to Dylan Thomas, but I, for one, do not intend to go gentle into that good night."
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