Purely from a user point of view, shouldn't "aborted" mean a ROLLBACK issues by the application due to a violation of a business rule, whereas "failed" should mean as a ROLLBACK issues by PG due to constraint violation or like disk full or whatever.
I was using failed because I hadn't done sufficient research and wasn't aware of "aborted" being used in this context. The error in psql itself says "current transaction is aborted ..."
There is no distinction as to why the statements failed and the transaction is in an aborted state as far as a transaction is concerned.
