Okay, so, here's a great example of a typical rant post from me, I suppose. I do not understand the fascination with the overuse of the words "win" and "fail." More specifically, the verbs win and fail, which have now become assimilated into our vernacular so incorrectly, masquerading as other parts of speech.
Also, I just had HARDCORE deja vu. I literally just screamed at my roommate to stop talking since she was saying everything I pre-sensed a year or two ago about me typing this blog post, the same song is playing, etc. ANYWAY.
So as some of you may know, I'm an avid deviantTARD, a.k.a. a member and addict of the popular online art gallery, Deviant Art. Upon opening my inbox today to see what new artwork has been created by other deviants, I stumbled upon a stamp. Stamps on deviantART are merely small pixelated creations which you can both author and display on your homepage. I've created many of my own.
However, I found this one that declares the futile statement, "Cheese is made of win."
How stupid is that? With the advent of FailBlog, the use of the word "fail" as a noun, a descriptive adjective, or just about anything but the infinitive verb "to fail" has exploded onto the scene. Think about how many times you've witnessed someone fall from grace (or maybe just ungracefully down a flight of stairs) only to hear someone half-assedly interject, "Haha, fail." I'm guilty of it myself, but rarely.
So in saying that "cheese is made of win," this person is oh so brilliantly quantifying "win" as, purportedly, the amount of... what? The amount of success-ness an object is able to possess? The ability or potential of an object to succeed/be victorious over something else? It bothers me that we now have shortened it, in my generation's incredible ability to make everything easier for ourselves, to just "win."
For example, you might think this blog is win. Not "this blog is well-written," or "this blog succeeds at explaining details/making me laugh/forcing me to think," but just "it's win." Two nouns set up in apposition with one another. "Blog" = "win," not "this blog has a quality of winning/success." Just as if someone does something so deserving of jest, punishment, or just general disapproval, it is nowadays labeled as "fail," with no regard as to how the word itself is being used to modify the action or person in question.
"Joe fails at life," however annoying I find that sentence (Joe fails at living life? Joe does not succeed at living life in a positive manner?), is still better than "Joe is fail," or "Joe is full of fail."
Similarly, here are two other examples that appear when you type in "fail" in the search bar in deviantART's Deviant Stamps category:
"I fail at life so epically I almost win."
"Twilight because fail book is made of FAIL." This one is particularly horrendous. One, there's no colon after "Twilight" to indicate that this is a statement, and two, if you're going to critique Stephanie Meyer's atrocious literary massacre that is the Twilight series, don't abuse the English language so successfully yourself, bro.
(Additionally, its aesthetic typography is just... made of fail.) I should make a counter-stamp to the latter. "Twilight fail stamp is so fail that it almost WINS." It doesn't make sense to me to cheapen "something adept at failure" to merely "something that is fail/made of fail." How about "comprised of failure?" Is this just a Warren G. Harding situation between normality/normalcy, only with fail/failure? Either way, it's annoying.
Among the many other words that have been bastardized and smuggled furtively into the English language, I think these two polar opposites FAIL the most.
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