11.08.08
What we have here is a fail to communicate (bang!)
Today’s instruction: Always use fail as a verb! A thing that fails is a failure!
Always use it as a verb, Mr. Brohaugh?
Yes. Without fail! . . . oops.
I bring this up because of Christopher Beam’s recent Slate coverage of the increasing use of fail as a noun (which I discovered by way of Editrix alert). I suggest that Slate’s shot at the noun was not a complete succeed. For one, modern use of the noun is slangish and a bit distracting, but I’m not sure it’s precisely the “Internet meme” that Slate would have it. Fail as a noun was first recorded near the turn of the 13th century. Chaucer used it, as did Shakespeare and Swift. It has been dubbed “obsolete” by the Oxford English Dictionary, with the exception of the fossil phrase, “without fail.”
Is the modern use a revival, or a new formation? Here’s an excerpt from Slate:
Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies. But there’s evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it’s easier to say than failure. (Need for brevity might explain why, in Webspeak, the opposite of fail is not success but win.) And there’s a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience.
Yes, but there are other proud neological traditions, as well, such as verb-to-noun conversion? Both the original noun and the original verb use appear about the same time, both brought in from Old French; one was not—in English, at least—a conversion of the other. In the case of the modern use, I suspect it’s conversion and not shortening, just as the noun convert was converted from the verb convert. Particularly in the light that first recorded use of failure comes just under 350 years after fail the noun.
By the way, Slate points to a good blog recording fails: FAILblog, but fails to note its kin, the English FAIL Blog.
And the title of this piece? Just another excuse to honor Paul Newman:
, 
and 
. Feel free to 
JohnnyB said,
November 8, 2008 at 11:57 am
While I agree that the “FAIL” blogs are not ruining the language, I believe that “Cool Hand Luke” line would not be among the classics of all time if the Captain had said “What we’ve got here is…communication fail,” or if he had not even spoken but a graphic appeared, stamped across the screen: “Communicate FAIL.”
In addition, I think the clip is more of a tribute to Strother Martin then Paul Newman.
Honor FAIL!
Bill Brohaugh said,
November 8, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Good points all. As for Strother Martin, I was on a Paul Newman roll of late, so I didn’t mean to discount him. Strother Martin is one of my favorite character actors. His bickering with LQ Jones in the Wild Bunch (one of the top Westerns of all time in my book) is priceless.