Fail as an adjective

Lynne Murphy m.l.murphy at SUSSEX.AC.UK
Fri Jul 10 09:12:03 UTC 2009


Or is it that 'so' has become an all-purpose intensifier that goes with
nouns as well as adjectives?  See this song lyric, which popped up when I
searched "I'm so loser":

<http://www.lyricstime.com/melody-fall-i-m-so-me-lyrics.html>

Lynne

--On 09 July 2009 07:15 -0700 Karl Hagen <karl at POLYSYLLABIC.COM> wrote:

> I've seen the discussion of nominalized "fail", but it's also being used
> as a predicate adjective, as I discovered yesterday when I overheard a
> teenager saying to his friends "I'm so fail".
>
> This construction gets more than a few g-hits. Brief commentary here:
>
> http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=node/249



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics
Arts B357
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list