Editorial Emergency, a charming force for good in copy writing, sends out an e-news publication, “Editorializing.” Recently they published an editorial titled, “Stop Abbreviation Abuse Now!” This targeted some truly awful usages, such as “devo” instead of “development,” and “install” for “installation.”

But they made a slight error regarding the use of “fail,” not realizing this particular term is a deliberate, joking misusage. From the article:

But I wonder if those using “fail” as a stand-in for “failure” are simply witless.

If you regularly use “fail” instead of “failure,” please tell me why. Is it because you think it sounds cool? (It doesn’t.) Is it because you’re in a hurry? If the latter, how much time do you save in not typing “ure?”

This was my response:

Dear Editorial Emergency staff,

I enjoy your columns, and agree with your general argument about abbreviations being a poor attempt to demonstrate familiarity. However, I think one of the words you complain about, “fail,” is in a different situation than the others.

While “install,” “devo,” etc., are used seriously, “fail” is nearly always a joke, and the original point of the joke was that “fail” was a failure of English. (I say nearly, because I haven’t heard all usages, but personally I’ve never heard it used seriously.) The word was misused in a Japanese video game which 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.

“Fail” was then popularized through a meme, in which unfortunate situations were captured and sent via camera phone with the subject line “Fail.” This also popped up online. Over two years ago, a blog run by the same publishers as icanhascheezburger.com appeared to capture these. Icanhascheezburger also deliberately misspells words to (a) mock bad texting, and (b) feed into the pretense that the writing comes from cats. The idea is that if a cat could write English, it would do so poorly. (Clearly they missed Wittgenstein’s observation about lions.) The misspellings have taken on a life of their own, and are now called Lolspeak.

About the time the blog began, “fail” had already spread widely, first among young people, and from them to the adults in their lives. It’s even made it into television dramas and comedies. This solidly breaks it out of jargonistic geek usage. See an example of a “fail” post here: http://failblog.org/2008/01/03/collar-cat/

All the other abbreviated terms you mention are used seriously, but “fail” is a joke. Even when the failure is serious, calling it a “fail” takes it lightly. You may not find it humorous yourselves, but I thought you’d want to know: we’re not all witless. We’re looking at the failures in our world, and joking about teh* funny.

best regards,

Alex O’Neal

* “Teh” is lolspeak for “the,” as in, “Teh intarweb iz mayd of pipes.”

---

Update

Since this writing, Julia Rubiner of Editorial Emergency has kindly responded to my email, explaining she was being deliberately disingenuous in her assumed air of ignorance regarding “fail.” Just goes to show you should never make assumptions!