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:
I grew up in a town whose most famous native son is Frank King, creator of the Gasoline Alley comic strip (premiered 1918) once common in the Sunday comic pages. Growing up, I knew the comics section of the Sunday newspaper as the “Sunday funnies.” Certainly people in other regions called it that, too. Not that I cared, back when. As a youngster in moderately rural Wisconsin (Tomah, specifically, population 5,460 at the time), I didn’t know and therefore didn’t care that terminology might differ in other regions—I was then oblivious to such concepts as terminology and regions.
Until just recently, I had no idea that—oof-dah!—such colloquialisms as “Sunday funnies” might represent linguistics on the cusp (and maybe even at the lip of the eave trough, what some of you might know as a “rain gutter”) of language change.
Wisconsin lies at the edge of many of the most significant changes currently underway in American English. Learn more about what makes Wisconsin English remarkably distinctive and worth studying!
What? Drinking fountains the world over are now being called “bubblers“!? Maybe. Maybe not. The quote is from the Wisconsin Englishes website, where some serious stuff is going on, what-hey?:
Two major vowel changes in the US meet in Wisconsin. The eastward change is where the words caught and cot are pronounced essentially the same. The westward change is where vowels rotate in what is called the Northern Cities Shift ( bit > bet > butt > bought > baht > bat; six > sex > sucks > Saux’s > socks > sax ).
Doncha know! Allow me a juvenile giggle over the “six > sex > sucks > Saux’s > socks > sax” progression. As a native Wisconsinite, this progression makes me wonder about what really goes on in Sauk City. Methinks that sax/socksophones are not involved.
I love this site, because it takes a marvelous Everything You Know About English Is Wrong “I’m-serious-but-I-don’t-take-it-with-funereal-solemnity” attitude.
Bottom line, because it’s Sunday and we all need an injection of funnies, I’ll leave you with something I rarely promulgate (a word seldom used in the comics/funnies/funny papers)—an internet list. In the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy (with some of the verbal things prioritized), “You might be from rural Wisconsin if . . .”
You know that “combine” is a noun.
You can make sense of “upnort” and “batree”.
Pop is the only name for soda.
You know that “creek” rhymes with “pick”.
You hear someone use the word “oof-dah” and you don’t break into uncontrollable laughter.
You know what knee-high by the Fourth of July means.
You know how to polka, but never tried it sober…
You know it is traditional for the bride and groom to go bar hopping between the reception and wedding dance.
You know the difference between “Green” and “Red” farm machinery, and would fight with your friends on the playground over which was better! [Brohaugh notes: I grew up with Red, but much prefer Green.]
You buy Christmas presents at Fleet Farm.
You spent more on beer & liquor than you did on food at your wedding.
Every wedding dance you have ever been to has the hokey pokey and the chicken dance.
Your definition of a small town is one that only has one bar.
The local gas station sells live bait.
You or someone you know was a “Dairy Princess” at the county fair. [Brohaugh notes: Wasn’t me. Honest.]
You let your older siblings talk you into putting your tongue on a steel post in the middle of winter.
You think Lutheran and Catholic are THE major religions. [Brohaugh notes: Add Packer fandom—see next entry.]
Football schedules, hunting season and harvest are all taken into consideration before wedding dates are set.
Saturday you go to your local bowling alley. [Brohaugh notes: Vlasek’s Bowling Alley, to be specific. Alas, it’s no longer there.]
There was at least one kid in your class who had to help milk cows in the morning… phew!
You have driven your car on the lake.
(Side note: David Benjamin has written a superb memoir of growing up in my home town of Tomah, Wisconsin, just a few years ahead of me in the categories of school grades and age. I recommend The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked primarily for its grace and style, then for its sharp observations on growing up in the ’50s. It’s a much better read than, say, an aged comic strip, an internet list or a snarky language blog . . .)
I’m fascinated when persnickitors peer into certain English locution voids and see purgatory and hell and not simply a vacuum that both nature and language abhore. I regularly refer to ain’t as a word villified persnickitorially on grammatical grounds (and not, more appropriately, on contextual grounds) depite the word’s perfectly grammatical foundations. Ain’t, as my defense goes, fills a void because we have no “am not” contraction. So, occasionally in conversation, I go, “Ain’t doesn’t deserve such disrespect.”
I sense the cringing. Eww! “Goes”, goes the persnickitors’ lament.
Allow me to agitate the lamenters. Though using go to identify the beginning of a direct quote is relatively and slangishly new, not to mention (I’ll readily admit) annoying, it fills a void. Say is a synonym, but is less precise because say can signal paraphrase, or even non-speech. (”That suit says ‘professional.’” Indeed? In what sort of accent?) Go generally signals a precise quote. (”I’m sure you’re familiar with our national anthem. This is how it goes . . .”). And using go is less pretentious than “occasionally in conversation, I say, and I quote . . .”
Now that I’m going the way of the cringe-making fool, let’s next discuss conversational “air quotes”—informal “sign language” (picture the air quotes as I write that) sympatico with using goes instead of says. Though, air quotes can be and are annoying, I accept them. And I accept them despite the fact that the air finger gesture used to communicate such quotes looks a lot like Tim the Enchanter warning King Arthur that “death awaits you all with nasty big pointy teeth” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Air quotes accomplish in gesture what the punctuational squigglies do in writing. Why do some folks get so annoyed over a relatively new gesture in conversation when we similarly employ so many other gestures? If body language is OK, why not body punctuation? Who hasn’t closed an emphatic statement with a sharp pointing gesture? Air period!
Ultimately: sometimes in informal speech, anything goes.
Rather, misspelling lessens . . . lessens the impact of this newsletter coverage of a recent poll. Subject: impact of the digital age on the commercial viability of books.
Myself, I’d like to think that the digital age might serve to “significantly lesson” some postmyblog-nownownow digital age writers (if you grant me the verbification of lesson as a synonym for instruct). The issue is not whether the digital age will send legions of little electronic silverfish onto our bookshelves to gobble up all the paper books and cast the pages within from their tomes into their tombs. The issue is whether the digital age will send those silverfish into our writerly brains to kill the words themselves.
I’m being overly dramatic here, of course. Yet, I ask you to appreciate the irony of a web newsletter talking about the potential death of books via electronica while displaying the death of language precision via electronica. Is the “lessen lesson” attributable to relying on homonym-blind spell-checks? Or to what I consider to be the far greater danger: Instant publication sans editorial filters (that is to say, real editors, writers who actually look at their words twice other than to admire them, and real editors who edit the words of writers enamored with their own words).
Mistakes happen. I understand this personally, as I admit that I’ve fallen into the “lessen lesson” homonym trap myself—in drafts and not, to my knowledge, in published material.
The real danger to writing and to books is neither technology nor the digital age. It is haste. Slap-dash postmypearlsofwisdomnownownowhastehastehaste. Haste doesn’t necessarily make waste. Haste makes nonsense.
Writers are often driven into their craft by what we might call “aftershock eloquence.” We can get our thoughts together, but not until after the “moment,” somewhat like an earthquake aftershock. The perfect repost to an insult from a friend surfaces . . . three days after the argument. I admire those with quick wit and quick reasoning (in both the original sense of quick as “living” and its current sense as “speedy”). Me, I tend to do what small level of thinking I’m able to achieve at the keyboard.
Luckily, I don’t have that problem when talking about subjects I’m passionate about, English among them. (Barbeque, too, but that’s a topic for another day.) I’ve been blessed with dozens of opportunities to speak at writers conferences and in radio interviews. This past weekend, “Cincinnati Edition” on public radio WVXU broadcast this interview on public radio WVXU, talking about Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. My segment starts around 28:15. Trust me–I was in this instance appreciative of pre-recording and editing–though primarily because of pauses, slight stutters and such of the sort that had quickly dashed my brief college-days aspiration of being DJ. All Adjectives, All the Time!
Listening to the interview, I experience aftershock eloquence–that’s the editor in me. Could have said that better. Forgot to add such-and-such a tidbit. And so on. Which is fine, because now I get to write about it.
If you’ve ever experienced aftershock eloquence, don’t be frustrated or embarrassed. Cherish the qualities–the thinking and the creativity–involved in reaching “the perfect retort” or whatever good phrasings surface after the fact. They’re part of what makes us writers in the first place.
By the by, in the interview I chat about something that should give you nightmares: the possibility of a certain internet emoticon becoming a standard punctuation symbol in the next century, and perhaps you can guess which one:)
primarily for its grace and style, then for its sharp observations on growing up in the ’50s. It’s a much better read than, say, an aged comic strip, an internet list or a snarky language blog . . .)
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