I am in paperwork reviewing hell today and I see this phrase often: “willingly fail.” Person X willingly failed to update his sex offender registry. Person Y willingly failed to correct his substance abuse problem.
The phrasing does not sit well with me. To me, the word “fail” requires and attempt to achieve an objective and then to, well, fail to complete it. Stated better, despite your efforts, you did not achieve the goal–therefore you failed to achieve the goal. If you never tried in the first place, you didn’t fail, you just didn’t do it.
A: To attempt to do something and not succeed.
B: To not do something you should have done.
This is usage B so it is completely reasonable to say “willingly fail” to distinguish from simply forgetting to do something or not realize you needed to do it.
I would say yes, even with @griffin1977’s usage A. It would describe someone who puts in a token effort but has no intention of actually succeeding.
But I agree that usage B is what is likely meant by that legal jargon. The law doesn’t care about whether someone actually attempted something, just that they didn’t do it. “Failed to appear” doesn’t mean they tried to appear. It just means they didn’t appear.
Heck, if they did try and had a reasonable excuse for why they couldn’t, it might not be treated as a failure to appear.
Both uses seem perfectly cromulent to me, and in the context of the OP, it’s clear to me that definition #2 is being used, and a firm could definitely willingly fail to give adequate risk warnings.
Is the term “willingly fail” simply a cousin of “willfully fail”? Willful is a well known term, meaning to intentionally or deliberately cause something to occur, usually with a negative connotation. (e.g. willful neglect)
Willingly in the documents I am reading…Willfully is others I have seen. I guess I don’t really see a difference there.
But anyways, I understand that a second definition of fail can be that you simply did not do it. Let’s say my wife is going out of town and will be back Sunday and asks me to cut the grass before she gets home.
If she returns home on Sunday and the grass is not cut, then I have “failed” to cut the grass. It doesn’t matter if I meant to, but got lazy, or if it rained all week, or I had a heart attack and was in the hospital. I still failed to cut the grass. I get that.
But how can I “willingly” fail to cut the grass? That I had no intention of ever cutting it? I purposely didn’t cut the grass?
It seems to me like “refused” would be a much clearer word/term than “willingly fail” but maybe it is just me being persnickety.
I agree that “refused” would be more idiomatic in everyday English, but the legal profession loves their terms of art. “Failure to appear” is the term used, so they refer to doing so intentionally as “willingly failing to appear.” If the term of art was “refusal to appear,” then they’d use “refuse.”
As for whether they should change? Meh. I think it makes it sound a bit more formal to use slightly nonstandard but otherwise understandable language. But that’s just my opinion.
You are entitled to yours—whether it is “persnickety” or not.
You were expected to cut the grass.
You knew what the expectation was.
There were no extenuating/mitigating circumstances that would have prevented you from doing so.
You willingly chose not to do so. Thus, you failed to live up to the expectation.
You had ONE job!
Which you willingly failed to do, regardless of motive.
Which is why you have to sleep on the sofa.
If you “willingly fail” to do something, that means that failure was an outcome that was acceptable to you, but success might still have also been acceptable.
If you “willfully fail”, though, that means that it was your intent to fail.
I agree with what you said, but I think it hinges on the emphasis used in the word “prevented.” Say I was in the hospital for the week after having a heart attack, but I could have called a lawn service while I was in the hospital. Did I willingly fail? Or does “prevented” have a more forgiving meaning?
I’m not sure I agree. Say I apply for a nice new job I would love to have. I know that there is a possibility that I won’t get the job, and I’m not going to kick myself in the ass for months and go into a deep depression if I don’t get it. So it is, in a way, “acceptable” if I fail to get the job. Did I willingly fail to get the job?
It seems like in this (and most other things) when we try to nail down a rule, we have that one little word that requires another complicated rule which contains a similar word.
IANAL (and don’t know your wife ) but I would guess legally speaking your only out, in terms of showing you didn’t “willfully fail”, would be to show the second of these was not true and you can present evidence that in fact you were never told that you were expected to cut the grass.
My client can present DVR records show that he was in fact watching the football while this request was made from the other side of the room, and that goal mouth drama in the 88th minute prevented him from hearing said request.
“Willingly fail” sounds ungrammatical to me, but lawyers…
I guess what you’ve got to think about, is what is the distinction between ‘failed’ and ‘willingly failed’? Presumably it’s that the person who ‘willingly failed’ is culpable for that failure, whereas if someone simply ‘failed’ it might have been due to external circumstances. Person X failed to update his sex offender registry because he was in a coma, for example.
I feel like there should be a better term, but can’t think of it.
I think willing failure includes not only failure, but awareness of what it takes to “not fail” and the absence of a good faith effort to achieve the “not fail” outcome. One might also expect that there was a reasonable prospect of achieving that “not fail” outcome if only a good faith effort had been put it.
One might study really hard for an exam and yet still fail it. One might also decide that they no longer wish to pursue the course they have been set upon, and so decline to study in spite of their known shortcomings, or even to purposefully decline to show up to the exam and accept a zero on it. Failingly willingly. Willingly failing.
ETA: Willful failure sounds an awful lot like failure through recklessness or intentional/purposeful act, rather than mere negligence.
I feel the issue here is the OP is using “failed” as a synonym for “tried and failed”. Which I feel it is not.
It is possible to fail at something without making any attempt to try to succeed. When somebody fails without trying to succeed, they are willingly failing.
I suppose you could make a further distinction between people who fail by not attempting to do something they were capable of doing and people who fail by not attempting to do something they are certain they would have been unable to do. There seems to me to be a distinction between willingly failing to wash my dishes because I made no attempt to wash them and willingly failing to fly because I was certain that flapping my arms would not work so I didn’t try.
