The world as it should be

“Fail” and “epic fail” seem to be showing up more and more in the tweets I read. Both went viral on the web about a year ago and people assign the terms to both simple and catastrophic fumbles, stumbles and, of course, failures.

According to Slate’s Christopher Beam (Oct. 2008), fail really took off when the blog Failblog started up in May, 2008. Failblog set up a taxonomy of what constituted various levels of fail and of epic fail, the highest fail there can be.

I want to introduce a subtle variation on the theme: FLAIL and, of course, EPIC FLAIL.

A flail differs from a fail mainly in scope. Whereas fail represents the inability to do something, a failure being utter and complete, a flail represents a bad performance on something most people can do easily, but it’s not a complete failure. Just an inept, incompetent, or incomplete performance, usually by someone who believes they are very good.

For instance, an act deserving a fail might be forgetting to put the top up on your convertible during a thunderstorm; a flail would be if you go out to put the top up and you forget your keys and have to dash back through the rain to get them. Then you grab the wrong keys. If you then finally put the top up, but forget to close the windows, it would be approach epic flail status or almost total incompetence, especially if you were going off on people who don’t take care of their cars like you do when the storm hit.

Flail also involves people who think they know what they are doing but don’t, their lack of self-awareness providing much entertainment for those around them.

You run into a lot of flailers in amateur sports and in bars and in school. A person who has the most expensive golf clubs and brags about it, but fails to break 100? Flail. A person who has the most expensive golf clubs and loses his grip during a swing so that the club ends up in the pond? Epic flail.

A guy who walks up to an attractive woman in a bar and gets rejected is a fail. A guy who walks up to an attractive woman in a bar trailing a long piece of toilet paper stuck to his shoe and gets rejected is a flail.

A poor student who turns in bad work or zeroes an exam is obviously a fail. A student who believes his weak paper was directly dictated to him by God, and who doesn’t agree with the prof that a mere 10 errors in the first three paragraphs is too many, is a flail.

The difference is subtle but important. Anyone can fail, but only the blindly incompetent can flail.

The University of Reading in England has completed a study of the stability of language. Researchers found that fifty percent of the words we use today would be unrecognizable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago (http://tinyurl.com/aw5652).

As an English Lit major, I struggled with Beowulf and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, so I can imagine that “English” 2,500 years ago must have been different indeed.

Imagine how someone from 2,500 years ago would deal with, like, language today, youknowwhatI’msayin? He would like go, Whoa, and then go What’s up with, like, that, you know? It would be wild, man, and he would be, like, friggin freaked out.

And he would certainly feel entitled to a passing grade in my class just for showing up.