Those of you who spent the best part of 2012 trending YOLO on Twitter may be interested to know that there’s a company devoted to tracking such inexplicable linguistic fads. The Global Language Monitor recently announced its Words of the Year, and they were a lot less chirpy than the YOLOists’ mantra.
Topping the list was ‘404’, the code for online technical errors, followed by (brace yourselves) ‘fail’.
These were the most commonly mentioned terms, across multiple media forms, social groups — countries, in fact. They are words, not judgements, although it’s hard not to surmise a sense of disillusionment pervading the English-speaking world.
These words go hand in hand. Is the main 404 the haphazard and universal use of ‘Fail’ across social media sites?
The list is a testament to the growing predominance of online communication. On the likes of Twitter and Facebook, the word fail takes on a new meaning. It often becomes a self-contained sentence, a cultural shorthand for the amusing and the absurd.
Unfortunately, I am a promoter of this craze.
Whether I’ve been wrestling with my jammed lock for so long that the porters think I’m stealing someone’s bike, or I’ve had my bank account frozen because I’ve botched my own security questions (my Oxford offer continues to baffle me); mishaps like these are quickly condensed into snappy statuses. Life incidents become ‘like’ incidences. Whack a flippant ‘fail’ onto the end of your sentence and the whole event, regardless of the resolution, is deemed a write-off.
At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, punctuating our everyday lives with the word ‘fail’ quite literally perpetuates negativity. It’s serves as a public self-criticism, it reduces good days to a negative snapshot, and, if we’re being pedantic, replacing a suffix with a hashtag is grammatically incorrect.
My overuse of the word spawned an unfortunate slogan: ‘Fairbank Fail’. Friends gleefully apply the phrase not just to my own personal blunders, but to those of themselves and society at large. I toyed with the idea of starting a blog ‘Fairbank Fail: The Tragic Life of the Lovechild of Mr Bean and Bridget Jones’. Thankfully for the world, I decided against it.
It’s unsurprising that failure can take on a personal resonance in a place like Oxford, where we’re surrounded by the spoils of success and those striving towards it. At times this can be a little overwhelming. In fact the Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘overwhelmed’ could be substituted with a photo of a fresher seated next to the self-help section in the Gladstone Link, mid-essay crisis, alongside titles such as ‘The Power of Creative Intelligence’ and ‘Life’s a Pitch’.
Perhaps in response to these all too literal pressures, the university offers ‘Mindfulness’ courses, teaching you how to put aside past or future concerns and live in the present moment.
It sounds airy fairy. I admit, I struggled to see the link between focusing on a raisin and improving my awareness (Class 1). I quickly grew disillusioned, and mentally added mindfulness to the list of Things I Can’t Do.
But in these sessions, failure is acknowledged but not allowed to be the defining factor. It’s put in proportion, in a sense; if you find yourself planning dinner when they’ve asked you to meditate, that’s okay. Recognize the distraction. Try again.
Although I’ve found it hard to engage with the practical aspects of mindfulness, I agree with the principles. Thoughts are not facts, but mental events driven by emotion. If you think you are failing, this doesn’t mean that you are actually failing. If you think you are Beyonce, this does not mean that you are actually Beyonce. This usually means that you are drunk in Wahoo.
The Oprah-esque tone of this article is probably borne out of some sort of cliché ‘Oh My God I’m a Finalist’ existential crisis. Third years take photos of friends eating breakfast in a desperate bid to memorialize college life, descend upon university societies in a ‘bucket- list’ frenzy — some of us even start using our Union membership. There is a perceptible attempt to consolidate university life, to brand it as successful, and this need to succeed frames our perception of the imminent Real World.
Up to now, success (rightly or wrongly) has had universal and tangible measures: GCSEs, A-Levels, university offers. We can’t approach life after uni in the same tick-box mindset, because the criteria for success is so diverse. Not having a cushy consultancy job lined up is not a failure, but an opportunity to find out what you really want to do. Graduation marks the completion of a successful education. Appreciate that. Give yourself a pat on the back. It’s okay not knowing what comes next.
I’ll stop now before this becomes a rehash of the song Don’t Stop Believin’. But I for one plan to think twice before automatically branding events, objects or myself a ‘fail’. Obviously #thishappenedbutthatisok isn’t quite as catchy. But a bit more optimism wouldn’t go amiss. And if we’re looking for the silver lining of the Word of the Year revelation… Last year it was ‘apocalypse’. So onwards and upwards.
