Spend some time on the Internet, and you’ll start to see a peculiar usage of the word fail popping up everywhere. A conservative blog posts an image of a United States-Russian diplomatic agreement with the president’s name spelled “Barak Obama” and calls it “White House Spellcheck FAIL.” Atlanta Braves fans take out their ire on outfielder Jeff Francoeur (since traded to the New York Mets) by changing his name to “Failcoeur.” On Twitter, disgruntled CNN-watchers complain about the network’s coverage of protests in Iran under the banner “CNNfail.”

Time was, fail was simply a verb that denoted being unsuccessful or falling short of expectations. It made occasional forays into nounhood, in fixed expressions like without fail and no-fail. That all started to change in certain online subcultures about six years ago. In July 2003, a contributor to Urbandictionary.com noted that fail could be used as an interjection “when one disapproves of something,” giving the example: “You actually bought that? FAIL.” This punchy stand-alone fail most likely originated as a shortened form of “You fail” or, more fully, “You fail it,” the taunting “game over” message in the late-’90s Japanese video game Blazing Star, notorious for its fractured English.

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.

A major vehicle for the success of fail has been FAIL Blog, a Web site set up in January 2008 and acquired a few months later by Pet Holdings, a blog conglomerate that has had great success with I Can Has Cheezburger? — the foremost purveyor of “lolcats,” a popular genre of humorous cat photos in which superimposed captions sport playfully poor grammar and spelling.