Slate — never heard of it, I asked Paul and he says it's an online magazine for the Olds — is trying to figure out why Internet people like to say "fail." It's because they like to "express [their] schadenfreude out loud," and it's one syllable shorter than "failure." And here I was thinking it's because 4chan kiddies and Twitter freaks are lemmings and will repeat everything until the humor has been bled dry.