Fail is fine
This post bugs me. It’s still bugging me 10 days later.
When someone says “FAIL”, what they’re really saying is, “I’m failing to understand a creative person’s constraints.”
This is a bold claim, too bold for my liking. When I say Fail, I’m saying ‘this doesn’t work as advertised’, ‘this isn’t doing it for me’. Such a response is impermissible? Really?
I like that I can tell the IT department or the TV network to go back to the drawing board when they get it wrong, and that I can do this with just four letters. I wouldn’t use Fail to criticize art—because I’d rightly be ignored—and I wouldn’t use it to criticize an individual—because I try not to be a dick.
Fail
marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity
Maybe. There is an empathy problem on the web—people forget pixels represent other people—and intellectual incuriosity remains a lousy basis for criticism in any medium. But watch the words ‘marks’ and ’signifies’ here. The problem here isn’t slang, for that’s all Fail is.
Slang is fine. Slang is, dare I say it, creative:
Attack the real problems, not the markers, the signifiers. Wood’s not trees.
