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:

Technically, I suppose you could call this a “blog.” You could. I won’t. As a word person, I look skeptically at the word blog. Which is a polite way to say I despise it.

Certainly, I honor the word mechanism that created it, as I do all mechanisms of English neology. It’s an interesting specimen of word-creation, too—an abbreviation that shortens the original phrase (”web-log”) from the front, while most abbreviations lop off the end (such as info for information). Variations occur, of course, such as flu from influenza—lopping off both middle and end.

The mechanism is sound. The result is grating. Blog has all the beauty of other words that start with the same B-L consonant combination, words that have remarkable affinity to the word blog: blather, blab, blabber, blah, blase, blob and bloney. Well, just kidding about that last one.

So, this is not a blog. It’s just blah blathering blabber.

Navel-Gazing Side Note Alert: To be slightly more succinct, I could have tightened my first sentence by writing “expounded on” as opposed to “expounded upon.” But concision is a matter of mental length as well as physical length. “Expounded on” sounds almost unnatural, in that a word as pompous as expounded nearly cries out to be followed by something equally pompous. The phrase is shorter, but mentally longer. And that’s today’s Write Tight moment. End Navel-Gazing Side Note Alert.