If you spend any time at all online, and especially on Twitter, you know the widespread use of “epic fail” as a perjorative indicating not just a failure, but a failure complete in its wrongness. The derivation of this term is covered in some detail on today’s New York Times’ On Language column.

In a few years’ time, the use of fail as an interjection caught on to such an extent that particularly egregious objects of ridicule required an even stronger barb: major fail, überfail, massive fail or, most popular of all, epic fail. The intensifying adjectives hinted that fail was becoming a new kind of noun: not simply a synonym for failure but, rather, a derisive label to slap on a miscue that is eminently mockable in its stupidity or wrongheadedness. Online cynics deploy fail as a countable noun (“That’s such a fail!”) and also as a mass noun that treats failure as an abstract quality: the offending party is often said to be full of fail or made of fail.

Also related to Twitter is today’s column by Virginia Heffernan regarding the use of #hastags on the service.