In January 2010, the American Dialect Society voted fail, the noun, the Most Useful Word of the Year. I first encountered the word a year and a half earlier, when the students in my Structure of English course taught me the slang phrase “epic fail.” An epic fail is not just any fail: it is a fail of monumental proportion, often, my students explained, involving hubris. As Slate magazine described it in an article in October of that year: “Not just coming in second in a bike race but doing so because you fell off your bike after prematurely raising your arms in victory” (Beam 2008). The collapse of several major American investment banks in 2008: an epic fail. The University of Michigan football team losing to Appalachian State in 2007: another epic fail.

Fail as a noun is linguistically interesting because it exemplifies language change, whether it represents a clipping from the noun failure or a functional shift from the verb fail to the noun fail. (The noun fail existed earlier in English but was listed by the Oxford English Dictionary as obsolete, except in the phrase without fail, until this innovative meaning of the noun fail was added to the Dictionary in 2011.) The emergence of the noun fail is the kind of linguistic change that linguists enjoy studying, a change that bubbles up “from the people” – in this case, perhaps, from a late 1990s arcade game in which players were told that “you fail it.” This phrase became a more widespread exclamation in response to someone’s failure at a range of activities, and once shortened to “Fail!” it would easily have enabled a functional shift of fail from verb to noun. The noun fail simultaneously exemplifies the kind of change that stereotypical prescriptive language pundits – pundits who take it upon themselves to tell English speakers how they should and should not talk and write in order to use “good” or “correct” English – would lament: Why do we need another noun when we already have failure? And why do people insist on nouning verbs?