"full of win"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Jun 1 17:15:38 UTC 2009


At 12:54 PM -0400 6/1/09, Mark Mandel wrote:
>Today on the tech site ZDNET (
>http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=1204&tag=nl.e539)
>Nine worst social media fails of 2009... thus
>far<http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=219839950-31c61b4cfb7d3bba57e7bed0062f2bf4-bf&brand=ZDNET&s=5>
>
>m a m

This is certainly a nouning, and in fact I can't see any difference
(other than trendiness) between "fail" (n.) and "failure".  But it's
certainly not part of the mass-nouning of verbs.

LH

>
>On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Ann Burlingham
><ann at burlinghambooks.com>wrote:
>
>>  On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
>>  wrote:
>>  > from
>>  >   The Buzzwords of 2008
>>  >   By MARK LEIBOVICH and GRANT BARRETT
>>  >   NYT Week in Review 12/21/08:
>>  >
>>  > Largely used online, this is a verb turned into a mass noun, as in "A
>>  > bucket of fail." Common forms include _epic fail_, meaning a huge
>>  > overall tendency toward failure or a great example of failure, and
>>  > FAIL! as an interjection or derogation. Often an antonym of win, seen
>>  > online in forms like "Full of win!" which means, "It's good!"
>>
>>  I used "made of win" in a press release recently; although the kids I
>>  was talking about knew what I meant, the editors had serious problems
>>  (to the point of changing my wording).
>>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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