Epic Fail

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

Hi, Chip.

I’m calling from Huntington Beach, California.

Huntington Beach, California.

Well, welcome to the program.

Hello, Chip.

Thank you.

Hi.

What’s on your mind?

Well, I have a question about, I’m intrigued by the way my 15-year-old daughter and her friends are using words like jargon compared to the way we did.

And the word that I’m currently trying to understand her use of is fail, F-A-I-L.

-huh.

And she uses it like all the time.

If, like, for example, she’s trying to, you know, figure out chopsticks and some rice falls between the bowl in her mouth, she says, oh, I failed.

Or if, and she and her friends are, you know, pretty good students.

So if she gets a B on a test that she thought she was going to get an A on, she’d say, oh, I failed.

Oh, wow.

When I was growing up, that would have been an F for a D, not a B, you know.

Right, right.

Right.

Can I give you a quick example that she told me?

Yes, please.

This was classic.

And they use it to each other, not necessarily about themselves.

So she said if she was walking across campus with a load of books and one fell off, you know, with her friends, she would say, oh, I fail.

And then if she bent over to pick up the book and all of them fell, you know, making a big mess, one of her friends would say, no, that’s an epic fail.

Yeah.

So I just am really curious.

The words they use in common conversation, they’re great kids.

They don’t really use profanity or anything.

But the words that they use in terms of slang seem to be kind of extreme or final or maybe a little competitive or something.

It doesn’t seem to be reflected in their relationships, but I just wondered if maybe that’s a trend in jargon, especially among young people or whatever.

It’s definitely a trend.

I think slang is what we’re talking about more than jargon, though.

Jargon being more for the workplace.

Epic and epic fail are peaking.

Maybe even past their peak as slang words used by young folks.

I think I included in my New York Times words of the year list a few years ago as just standouts just by how popular they were and how common they were and being used in headlines.

There’s even a trend of taking photographs of some accident or something strange happening like an overloaded truck, you know, where the bed of the truck is touching the ground and putting the word fail in big block letters across the top of it.

So, yeah, they’re definitely in touch with a larger stream of slang that has spread through the United States.

Yeah, Chip, you might enjoy Fail Blog.

I think that’s the name of it.

Yeah, that’s right.

You go there.

It’s really funny.

Some of it’s kind of risque, but it’s a lot of photographs of fails now that fail has sort of become a noun.

And they’re labeled fail.

Like here’s one.

I’m looking online.

It says, this is from a text.

It says, the statistics show that 100% of the people who were bitten by a snake were close to it.

And they have in big letters, fail.

Yeah, because it’s often used as an interjection rather than using, just simply insert it into the conversation.

Or, you know, somebody trips and falls and you shout gleefully, fail, or something like that.

The other thing that you said which really interests me is that she uses it for things as simple as dropping a little rice when she’s using chopsticks.

And that probably represents a kind of what’s called semantic bleaching.

Semantic bleaching.

Right, B-L-E-A-C-H-I-N-G, just like the stuff you use in the washing machine.

Oh, yeah, or every six weeks, some of us.

So this is the stuff.

It took me a second there.

I have very little hair, so let me do it.

So this means that we take a word that has a fairly harsh definition or a harsh connotation, and it softens over time.

So a failure isn’t really a fail.

A fail is something different than a failure.

It’s some minor disappointment or some kind of you have defeated yourself.

Often these fails don’t represent a competition, and they don’t represent some kind of ranking.

They simply mean you did something really terribly when you’re expected to do much better.

Oh, okay.

Well, thanks for that report from the field.

And we welcome more reports from the field.

If you’ve got them, send us some e-mails, ship some time, and let us know what she’s talking about now.

All right.

Thank you very much.

This has been fun.

Take care.

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Bye-bye.

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