“Fail” gets the NYT treatment

The New York Times' "On Language" blog has a post about the word "fail" and how it has transformed from common verb to Internet exclamation to noun -- and even adjective in some cases.

Ben Huh, CEO of Pet Holdings, the company that owns Fail Blog, told the Times that "fail" really took off because of the financial crisis. As NYT writer Ben Zimmer notes:

The fail meme met the financial crisis head on at a Senate hearing in September, when a demonstrator held up a sign reading ''FAIL'' behind Henry Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Online snark had graduated to political protest, though as a rallying slogan, the vagueness of fail leaves much to be desired.

Zimmer notes that the "fail" phenomenon has its detractors and quotes Anil Dash, from a comment appended to his June 2009 essay, "The End of Fail":

"'FAIL' isn't advocacy; it's the tool of those who don't know how to be advocates, who don't know how to persuade,'' Dash argues. ''It puts the ego of the complainers ahead of the cause they're trying to advocate.''

I include this, from the body of Dash's essay:

They choose a reflexive shorthand instead of a reasoned critique, and they bring out the worst in a community. I care deeply about people being creative on the web, and I care almost as much about people having thoughtful and productive conversations on the web.

Dash is right, of course. "Fail" is ridicule and insensitivity, wrapped into a conveniently short and pithy four-letter word. In fact, the whole fail issue reminds me of a scene from Hamlet. Bear with me on this.

It comes from Act III, Scene II, when Hamlet is giving the players their final instructions before they go on in Elsinore castle.

Hamlet: ...There be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise [...] that [...] have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. [...] And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.

In other words, these "players," these users of "fail" strut and bellow, but they are socially constructed creatures, bred by a society that praises them and rewards them for being blowhards and hams. These clowns distracts us from more important matters -- which Dash argues are how we might improve ourselves and each other. Rather than working together to move forward, the Web smashes failures with snark and ridicule. And for anyone who has been the target of such a reaction, it's enough to drive you to tears.

Yes, I've laughed empty laughs at the Fail Blog. I probably will in the future, but maybe I'll stop to think that some of those fails just aren't funny. I uninstalled the "Icanhazcheezburger" app from my iPod Touch; maybe that's a step in the better direction.

But Zimmer from the Times is right. Regardless of the morality of "fail," the word is, for better or worse, here to stay.

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