After recently discovering the awesome interview archive at charlierose.com I've forgone my usual music playlists for his lively, intelligent discussions as the soundtrack to my working day.

It was a couple of days ago while playing a Bill Maher interview from 1996 that something he said jumped out at me. After replaying the soundbite and re-checking the interview date the evidence was undeniable: Bill Maher was using "Fail" as a stand-alone interjection almost 15 years ago.

Know Your Meme traces this usage back to 1998 -- a couple of years after Bill. And Wikipedia simply references the KYM article on the term's origin. So here's the excerpt (with typography added by me) to hopefully correct, or at least update, the meme's origin.