god that failed

English

Etymology

Popularised by The God that Failed (1949), a volume of essays by ex-communists critiquing communism.

Noun

god that failed (plural gods that failed)

1. (figurative, idiomatic) A notable let-down or flop; a concept, product or person that has failed to live up to very high expectations.
   • 1969, John Ardagh, The New French Revolution, page 359:

     And it is just because [Sartre’s] early post-war influence was so great, and his intellectual magnetism so hypnotic, that today he has left such disarray among intellectuals throughout France. God has failed him; but he, too, is a god that failed. Today his public utterances still make headlines, but his real leadership has passed.

   • 1980 September 18, Gary Herman, “Highway 61 re-routed”, in New Society, volume 53, number 931, page 571:

     Only the ones who stay away can come to terms with [Bob] Dylan’s new irrelevance. He never pretended to have any answers and, now that he seems to have no questions either, he may finally have made it into the ranks of the gods that failed.

   • 1996, Richard G. Fox, “Self-Made”, in Wimal Dissanayake, editor, Narratives of Agency: Self-Making in China, India, and Japan, →ISBN, page 108:

     Still, reflexive anthropologists are right: the idea of a neatly tied-up ethnographic package, of a realist ethnography that was temporal, functionalist, and unmindful of inequality and power—that was certainly a god that failed.

   • 2009 May 18, Dwayne Day, “The god that failed”, in The Space Review:

     At its best, the space colonization vision was sophisticated daydreaming, not a future that a large number of Americans wanted to make happen. The vision had its shot and never caught on, despite appearing in the pages of a highly reputable magazine and gaining the attention of political decision makers. [See title]

   • 2010 October 14, Martin Kettle, “Shed no tears for Liverpool: our football needs deflating”, in The Guardian:

     Get real about English football. It is a god that failed. Stop worshipping it. It is the reflection of the unbalanced, short-termist hedonism of the financial boom era.

   • 2011, Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India, →ISBN, page 13:

     For most Assam locals, tea eventually became the god that failed.