Why has the Internet-trendy term “fail” gotten so popular of late?

Apparently, because it’s easier to say than schadenfreude. Oh, and because of the recent economic meltdown:

It’s no wonder, then, that the fail meme gained wider currency with the advent of the financial crisis. Some observers relished watching wealthier-than-God investment bankers get their comeuppance. It helped that the two events occurred at the same time—Google searches for fail surged in early 2008, around the same time the mortgage crisis started to pick up steam. And the ubiquity of phrases like “failed mortgages” and “bank failures” seemed to echo the popular meme, which may have helped usher the term out of 4chan boards and onto blogs. It’s rare that an Internet fad finds such a suitable mainstream vehicle for its dissemination. It’s as if LOLcats coincided with a global outbreak of some feline adorability virus. The financial crisis also fits neatly into the Internet’s tendency toward overstatement. (Worst. Subprime mortgage crisis. Ever.) Only this time, it’s not an exaggeration.

And to dispel the notion that this interjection is but a passing fad: “Fail’s” abbreviative derivation and brevity put it in line with other English-language word origins:

Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies. But there’s evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it’s easier to say than failure. (Need for brevity might explain why, in Webspeak, the opposite of fail is not success but win.) And there’s a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience. Between Old and Middle English, many nouns stopped being declined, says Anatoly Liberman, an etymologist at the University of Minnesota. Likewise, while Romance languages still conjugate their verbs, English keeps it relatively simple: I speak, you speak, we speak, etc. It’s also common for verbs to become nouns, Liberman points out. You can lock a door, but it also has a lock. You can bike, but you can also own a bike. There was great fuss a century ago among readers of the British magazine Notes and Queries when it used the word meet to refer to a sporting event. It’s not surprising that failure would eventually spawn fail.

If it roots itself into the mainstream, so be it. For now, I eschew it because, to echo these sentiments, it just comes off as pretentious and annoying to me. And I hardly need any additional help to achieve that sort of attitude.