To go along with my misnamed 'TV trends' thread.

So, is anyone else sick of seeing " . . . FAIL!" ? (Note to Gillian, I included the '!' inside the quotes with the '?' outside, because the former is part of the phrase, not the sentence. Don't know if that's the right way to do it, but there it is.)

Anyway, it was innocent enough when it was just pictures of some idiot doing something idiotic. But when I'm seeing it on major news network articles and ads? And saying something, then adding ' . . . FAIL!' just looks too much like the '. . . NOT!' thing back from my grade-school days.

And I'm hearing people use it in speech now too. Maybe I'm just getting old and set in my slang, meaning I'm embarking on the phase of life where I think everything the young and/or 'trendy' do is stupid. Rather, I'd like to think that nothing I use to say or do was a stupid trend (yes, I can live happily in denial).

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Most memes get annoying once they've gotten stale enough to reach the mainstream.

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And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Fazor, you might appreciate the flowchart on this page:

Cracked topic page: memes

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“There’s nothing that spells progress in large, friendly letters like trying to combine two totally incompatible technologies.” – David Szondy, Tales of Future Past.

Perfectly acceptable in this situation. It still makes me twitch, though.

I use "you fail." Or "[noun] fail," sometimes. Then again, I may be, contrary to popular belief, less inclined to draw attention to another person's embarassing mistakes just because the idea of a mistake is funny. (There is, however, such thing as a funny mistake.) Heh. And while I saw Wayne's World in the theatre during my freshman year in high school, I never really got into "not," either. We did, however, use "No way!" "Way!" A lot. It probably drove my mother nuts.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Yep, I see it constantly at work!

In fact, one of the online tools listed the most commonly used tags, and #1 was...Fail! Like anybody really wants to search for failures or something....

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Our host, the BA, has an annoying tendency to use these internet slang terms in his otherwise excellent blog. I wish he'd leave them to the folks a generation or so younger.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

I've never heard or seen that. Maybe it hasn't reached the SW yet or (more likely) I'm just out of the loop.

Don't know if this web site pre or post dates the expression - but it is one of the more entertaining ones....

.....Fail!

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Gone Sailing

I think it's very annoying when any grammatical error because of a bad translation becomes popular.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

I've never seen or heard it either. I do hear lots of weird things from my middle schoolers.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

I know the feeling. My father in law used to say "when you get old, you'll only see 2 kinds of people: young and old". And that came true for me.

So, yeah, I am irritated by the trendy.

Recently I've heard: woo, poe, twitter (or is it tweet?) , and others. And I try to define, but sometimes I feel like throwing in the towel.

Heh. Came true for me, too. But I still remember how it looked to me when I was young: Only two kinds of people--the enlightened visionaries, and the old people.

oh noes, you've been pwned.

i think stuff like the "...FAIL!" thing came about becasue everyone is invincible when sitting at home and typing away on the computer and sending messages over the magical interweb machine. for some reason, people like to tear apart the accomplishments of other people.
this is one of those things that will never be said out loud in a face to face situation, mostly out of fear of actual physical retribution.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

And now, it's the enlightened visionaries, and the young people

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

oh noes--that's another I see at work all the time. Where does this stuff come from?

pwned--don't see that at work so much, just on gaming sites on the internet.

I noticed when we got all these neat Web 2.0 tools to "enhance collaboration" at work, suddenly, you realize just how many critics there are out there! Everything is just plain stupid and my dog could do it better, etc. And it's always "they" who are responsible, so I make fun by reminding them that when you work for the government, you ARE "they".

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Much of it seems to be "Simpson's" references, but I guess those are also internet memes.

I agree, but would add that even if a younger generation member was writing an informational blog that had an international audience then he should also use slang sparingly. I think an occasional use of popular slang terms can spice up popular writing but overdoing it is like over-seasoning your cooking.

Nick

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--
Nick Theodorakis

Age-wise, MMOs are the great equalizer. I eventually became 'cool' with my teenage daughters when I started running an MMO guild. At first, I was the dork dad trying to play teen games. But then when our guild (read: my guild) became successful and people were clamoring to join, suddenly I was a cool dad again, just like when they were 6 years old.

Being around high-schoolers and college kids on a regular basis also simultaneously kept me in the meme loop and restored my faith in the next generation

I watch South Park, Family Guy, etc with the kids (two huge meme factories) and they watched 80s classics with me that a lot of their favorite shows draw from. It's a win-win. I did draw the line at Brazilian fart porn, however.

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"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph" -- Conan

The first time I saw it was a year ago on DailyKos. Since then I've seen it popping up in pop culture. I don't know where it started, but I thought it started there as a post timeout error sould return a simple "fail" statement. Of course, somewhere along the line people started saying "Epic Fail". I don't know from whence it came.

It's a shibboleth. Like any other slang, it's meant to separate those who know from those who don't. If you want to know and take the time to learn, you are part of the group. If you refuse to learn and accept it, then you are an outsider. Glory in that if you want, but the fuddy-duddies will eventually pass on and the n00bs will inherit the earth and do with it as they please.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

i just had the realization that it is now a popular internet trend to make negative comments about internet trends, which means that you are really just some sort of a hipster bag of a certain type, and so am i, becasue i pointed it out.
bleh..
everything is an internet trend..

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Interesting theory--my theory was unit testing for Java has a macro called "fail" that you call in all circumstances the test does not pass.

This might be how the urban legend theories get started, like the many theories for "the whole nine yards".

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

I guess now would be a bad time for a ROFLcopter?

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Aim high (but don't blow yourself up)!- Homer Hickam

In Soviet Russia, UFO report you!- Phil Plait

Carl Sagan may have seen a pale blue dot, but I see a sapphire.- Doug Phillips, Discovering Alabama.

Clear skies Maksutov.

You're talking about a folk etymology?

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

That would sound right.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Only two trends really annoy me:

"Meh". I know this didn't start on the 'Net, but it's never grown on me, though I've tried.

The "bad grammar joke" trend. This is kind of hard to summarize, but it started on sites like icanhascheezburger.com and has steadily infected informal chatboards everywhere, with pictures and phrases like "I paralyzes you" and "I has a flavor", and on and on. It was funny once, but it's been run into the ground, IMO.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

I'm bugged by the misuse of "2.0". There is no second "web". And when there is an actual second version of something, it's not necessarily good, so I don't get how putting "2.0" on something that isn't literally a second version of a program is supposed to make that thing sound good.

Worse yet, almost nobody pronounces it anywhere near correctly. It has no letters in it, people! It has only a "point" between two separate numerical digits!

Similar to the "misuse rather than overuse" being what bugs me in that case, my main problem with "fail" is when it's used not as an interjection but in a sentence as a noun.

"Woo" also bugs me not through overuse but because it's often done wrong. The complete form is "woo-woo". Singlifying the doubled syllable not only shows laziness & sloppiness, and makes it not the same thing anymore, but also bumps into the spelling and sound of another word which got there first. (I've even seen this pop up in a thread that was all about certain sources of advice on how to woo people!)

There is one place I know of where "fail" and "woo" can be good things. It's a separate forum website from this one, where people pride themselves on their logical objectivity and are very negative about ideas that lack logical or empirical support and the people who fall for them. Both the ideas and the people are usually called "woos", and when a "woo" fails to provide support for his/her "woo" ideas or answer pointed questions about them or counter a solid refutation of them, it's called a "fail". Or at least, that's apparently how the authors who use these words see it. But to me, it's often a sign that the author who's flinging those epithets around is the real woo-fail in the situation, having thrown away logic and objectivity in favor of personal put-downs and premature/feigned victory dances. So in those cases I like seeing "woo/fail" because it's a useful line in the sand, my signal that there's simply no reasoning with that author anymore so I might as well not bother to try.

"woo" is not always a simplification of "woo-woo". It is commonly used as a variant of "woot", which is a exclamation (favorable) of surprise.

"I won the roll for the magic sword. woo!"

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"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph" -- Conan

This originated, I believe, from the bad "Engrish" of poorly-translated games from Japan, etc. "All your base are belong to me" etc. "Can I has cheeseburger" was popularized by lolcats.

See this video for a more detailed explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jDfSqtG2E4

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"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph" -- Conan

Sorry, but this leads me to one of mine--the use of videos as explanations for things. A video can certainly be entertaining. A video can make an excellent how-to, as watching someone do something can, if done right, be better than reading how someone did something, even if that's done well. But an explanatory video of an etymological phenomenon is pretty much guaranteed to be worse than a written one, because there are subtleties that can be conveyed easily in writing that cannot be conveyed in speech without extra explanation. (As in, it's easier to explain "it's/"its" in print than having to spell it out every time.) My understanding is that YouTube prefers that you make a video to rebut someone's point in a video, and while I do get that videos are what YouTube is for, I find that an inefficient means of communication.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I read an article that tried looking at lolcats-speak from a grammatical perspective, the conclusion was that it's a distinct language, descendant from English, but with modified grammatical and spelling rules.
The surprising part was that the modified rules are actually followed very strictly by users of the language.

As such I don't find it irritating, but rather see it as an intellectual game played by people who find language to be a fascinating playground.

ETA, after reading Gillian's post which was made at the same time as mine.
For an example of something that would take mad video skillz (I know, sorry), try to teach the difference between "there", "their" and "they're".
Unless you do it SesameStreetStyle(tm), with the correct version clearly written while examples of correct use are shown.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Hey, Gillian, could you please post a link to a video that explains that for us?

I understand there's a "tldr" (too long, didn't read) abbreviation for posts. Is there one for videos? Like "tbdwcm" (too boring, didn't watch, crappy music)?

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The only ones that hate an elite are those who know they will never belong to one.