RICHARD: The word ‘loser’ does not have anywhere near the same connotations in this neck of the woods (at least not for my generation anyway) as it does in your part of the world … whereas the word ‘failure’ (as in ‘I am a failure’) does.
Speaking personally, and by any objective criteria, I am a failure big-time: I was a high-school dropout; I was a wartime coward/a peacetime pacifist; I was still a teenager when first married/my first marriage was a shotgun wedding; I had a mental breakdown/identity crisis in my early thirties; I lost my sanity, my wife, my family, my house, my car, my business, my career; I was a homeless person for five years/a bare-footed vagrant sleeping rough; I remarried only to lose my second wife, after the loss of insanity, of identity, of feelings, of reality, of truth, due to the total and permanent incapacity to be loving/compassionate and/or affectionate/ empathetic; I am classified as suffering from a chronic and incurable psychotic disorder/I am derealised, depersonalised, alexithymic, anhedonic; I have no ambition whatsoever/no aim in life at all; I often sit around doing nothing/ quite thoughtless; I am a teetotaller/I rarely socialise; I neither belong to any public organisation, club, guild, or fraternity/ sorority by whatever description, nor go to parties, bars, dances, discos or any other similar social venue; neither do I play competitive sports, support any team or player, or even attend any such sporting events; my main hobbies, apart from boating/ swimming on occasion, are watching television/ pottering about the internet; by going public with my life story I am quite often the recipient of derision, disparagement, scorn, mockery, disdain, belittlement, vilification, denigration, contempt, castigation, disapprobation, denunciation, and condemnation (and discrimination as evidenced by bad-mouthing, backbiting, slander, libel, defamation and a whole range of slurs, smears, censures, admonishments, reproaches, reprovals, and so on) and … and, to cut a long story short, I am currently living in what some call sin (a life of fornication with a live-in divorcée whilst still married to another).
What a failure (a loser) I am, eh?