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Isn't It Ironic?
gessel writes "Have you ever used the word "ironic?" Do you know what it really means? If not, is that ironic? Was Seinfeld's "irony" really the cause of the utter collapse of civil society as we knew it? How ironic was it for the CEO of MTV to declare irony a victim of 9/11? The Guardian is running a brilliant article that clears the confusion around a culturally critical and chronically misused word."
I find it rather ironic that the Guardian is doing a story on irony... or do I?
:)
However, I don't find it ironic that Slashdot picked up that story...or don't it?
I dunno. I'm confused even more now.
My journal has hot
Keep in mind that it will not be ironic for you to post something that is not ironic, but claim that it is. That would just be moronic.
1400x1250 in a 640x480 world...
Here's the big irony for this article: somehow, someone felt that it belongs under a heading that includes the phrase "stuff that matters."
or check out what this guy has to say.
In a recent South Park episode, Matt and Trey had the town under siege by greedy corporate Native Americans, intent on paving it over to make a highway from denver to their casino. The town won't sell out, so the Native American resort to rubbing blankets on SARS infected Chinese people and giving them to the townsfolk. One of the kids goes on a 'spirit-journey' using his culture's native vision-drug, huffing paint thinner, and he finds out that the cure for SARS is his culture's traditional medicine of Campbell's Chicken Soup, Nyquil, and Ginger Ale. The Chief's son also contracts SARS. The townsfolk give him the cure, and the chief gratefully gives them their town back.
Irony, as I understand it, is deliberatly saying the opposite of what you mean. No one really thinks Matt and Trey are trying to say that Native Americans are greedy soulless corporate scum.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If there's one term that, when used incorrectly, bugs me more than "irony", it's "AKA". I've often seen it misued as a replacement for "i.e." or "e.g." but there have been some worse offenders.
Example:
There are some OSes out there that really suck... AKA Windows 95
Or worse yet:
Man I'm tired from all of that work, AKA I partied all night.
Ugh.
From the article:
We have a grave problem with this word
Well, it so happens to be that we humans constantly shift the meaning of the words in our language. It is believed that the strongest driver of this is the universal appeal in appearing interesting to others.
Language teachers and writers of articles such as this fight a losing battle against such changes in language. Of course, in the long run, a word is defined by the people who use it and not by some dictionary from Oxford. The latter can be changed.
The guardians of language are often the biggest opponents of it's development and modernization. Isn't that ironic?
Tor
Sounds like Zoe Williams (the author of The Guardian article) is taking a line from Inigo Montoya:
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
People seem to like to use the word because it sounds cool, or makes them sound smart, or because they heard their friend say it. Like "who will think of the children?" or "what would Jesus do?" They probably have no idea what they're saying about except that they heard it on TV once.
Isn't it ironic?
this is my sig
Headline:
"Slashdot, home of bad grammar and spelling, posts article about proper grammar. Rioting ensues."
Slashdot is discussing proper English usage.
Just looking at the definitions, the confusion is understandable - in the first instance, rhetorical irony expands to cover any disjunction at all between language and meaning, with a couple of key exceptions (allegory also entails a disconnection between sign and meaning, but obviously isn't synonymous with irony; and lying, clearly, leaves that gap, but relies for its efficacy on an ignorant audience, where irony relies on a knowing one).
Anyone else feel like the writer was on speed or something? Break that sentence up man, my head is spinning.
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
It is the nature of languages to change. Just as society evolves, language evolves to suit it.
Sometimes it is done unintentially, othertimes it is done in the hopes of getting a product name out there ("I googled for it...", "Want a coke?" when you actually mean any generic soda, etc...) and other times it is done for the sake of brevity.
Irregardless of the motivation, the language evolves and eventually it becomes accepted enough and then it gets put into the dictionaries.
I had an interesting discussion with the folks at m-w.com about how that actually works. Pretty interesting stuff.
*shrug* That is how it works, so deal with it.
p.s. I used irregardless just to piss some people off.
Irony is when your ironing and listening to Alanis Morissette.
Edmund:Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?
Baldrick:Yeah, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron.
from Amy and Amiability
Yeah, but the would-be title "Doesn't it Suck?" doesn't work as well musically.
There's a page that goes line by line through the lyrics and explains why they are not examples of irony:
The True Irony of Alanis Morissette
Alanis Morissette sings a song titled "Ironic" on her album Jagged Little Pill. In this song she offers vignettes of situations where life is going well and then suddenly takes a turn for the worse. She exclaims, "Isn't it ironic...don't you think?" My answer: "No!" I have critically analyzed her lyrics and have found only 1 ironic episode therein. Ultimately I have discovered that she has no clue as to what irony really is.
That song always bothered me and I found this site really comforting that it bothered someone else enough to take the trouble to dissect it for everyone.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I found this article VERY interresting.
I'm not exactly sure how to use the word "Irony", but thanks to Fark, I know how not to use it ;)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
If you think the story is crap, you are free to move on. But this being a discussion forum, and "Isn't it ironic..." being on of its favourite phrases, why shouldn't some of us be interested in reflecting the original (yeah, avoiding "correct" here...) usage of this term, and how it is most commonly used instead these days. After all, with some sensitivity for language subtilities you can be much wittier, impress girls, most important get more slashdot karma... (If you don't believe me, try making jokes in any than your first language -- I had to learn this the hard way when I first came to an English speaking country.)
About 300 "dot com" companies, which are mostly famous these days for losing tremendous amounts of money, have agreed to pay $1 Billion to settle a lawsuit claiming that they inflated their IPO prices.
I guess it's really sad, rather than ironic.
Of Slashdot won't post a story on this settlement, either because (1) it's not news for nerds [and a Guardian story about irony is??], or (2) one of the dot-coms is VA Software.
This song is ironic as a whole. It's a song about irony (implied by the title) but nothing in the song is ironic, that is ironic by itself.
This sets up a paradox though, if the song is ironic because none of the lyrics are ironic yet the title implies that they should be. Well then the title makes sense and is not ironic anymore. Go back to step one rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
The irony is that a Slashdot grammar nazi got it wrong when being a nazi about grammar. Well, OK, it would be ironic if it weren't for the fact that this happens every time someone tries to correct someone else's grammar or spelling. Anyhow:
Grammar: (n) The study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences.
Grammar is about the structure of language, not its usage. An article about irony is not an article about proper grammar.
Bonus points for those of you who can point out the seven flaws in this message.
"That song always bothered me and I found this site really comforting that it bothered someone else enough to take the trouble to dissect it for everyone."
Isn't it ironic that your analysis was discredited by your taste in music?
except, iirc, she publicly stated that the irony of the song is that none of the examples of irony are actually irony
I saw an interview on television where she said this, but I just don't know if I should believe her. She said this after the whole world said the title of the song was the only thing ironic about it. But she is a clever gal, and I know how frustrating it can be when no one gets your irony, so I chose to accept her statement despite my doubts.
BTW Never try an ironic arguement in a room full of christian's whose parents are in the military. They will believe you are serious when you say we should wipe out the Swedes because they are just too blond. There is no one there to see the absurdity of their arguement that they shouldn't be wiped out because while they are not Baptists or Presbiterians they are Lutherans and Lutherans are still Christians. (My father was Lutheran, my name is Lutheran, I'm Scandinavian, and I was wearing a "Make Love Not War" pin. High school just made me want to beat my head against blunt objects, at least it was only the intro courses in college where people thought Brave New World was a good prescription for how we should live our lives.)
void*x=(*((void*(*)())&(x=(void*)0xfdeb58)))();
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Butthead: Umm, what's that word when you don't think something cool is going to happen and then it happens?
Stuart: Ironic?
Butthead: No dumbass, an English word.
Beavis: Umm,.. cool?
Butthead: Yeah. That was cool.
I remember a couple of years ago a comedian at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival disected the Alanis song Ironic ...
"'It's like rain on your wedding day' NO! That's only ironic if you're marrying a weatherman and he picked the date!"
He gave anything that is labelled ironic but blatently isn't, the title of Alanic.
That was enough for me to use the word more appropriately!
Not that I agree that the definition of irony should be changed. But English is still a living language, which means that the definition and scope of words will change. So perhaps someday in the dictionary under the entry for irony or ironic, it will include what people commonly mean it to be.
I really hate that fucking stupid song because none of the situations that Alanis Morrisette warbles out are actually ironic
A free ride when you already paid?
That's not irony that's just being an idiot.
Rain on your wedding day?
Oh yes look at the levels of irony in that one. No wait, it's just 'bad luck'.
Good advice that you just can't take?
Puhlease....
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
[glows slightly] 'tis! an amazing book.
One interesting thing about AHWOSG is the pace -- it starts out slooow, where every incident is described in great detail. It steadily accelerates throughout until the ending which is like "and then everybody grew upandgotahaircutandarealjobhappeverafterTHEEND."
At first I thought it was a little disappointing that such great writing could wind down so trivially. I would have expected it to be more evenly paced, with some brilliant dramatic event unfolding and coming to a climax somewhere about halfway between the middle and the end of the book.
But ( ironically? NOT! Ha!) life is like that: when you're a kid, every day seems like an eternity, and everything is terribly meaningful. As you get older it just...accelerates, and everything just seems less important--except the things that really are , which you never "get" except in retrospect.
To get back to the original article and the original topic, I liked the way it made the distinction amongst rhetorical irony, philosophical irony and situational irony.
For IBM, even more of a corporate bully in its day than M$, to be championing open source software, and even going to the wall for OSS against SCO, is situational irony. It's the opposite of what we've learned to expect from them.
Next week, class, we will discuss Syllogisms (anyone who had to live through the Reagan/Thatcher era will recognise these devices!).
what "texting" really needs is a global slashdot-style qualifier, such as
+5, Serious
"I have shot Lorna."
I was reading "Age of Irony" by Jedediah Purdy at http://www.prospect.org/print/V9/39/purdy-j.html and it all seemed to gel at last.
I have never understood why I really hated that term "don't take yourself too seriously." Well, at least now, I can study the true depths of its meaning, so as to form a counter argument.
First, what they mean, is now clear: among those who take themselves seriously, exists a large subset of people who are pompous, self-righteous, and at the worst extreme, people who are given to justiy the worst atrocities in the name of an ideology or religion.
But now, let's look at this (from Jedediah Purdy's essay):
My argument is, that 'irony', or more specifically, people who religiously take nothing seriously, have mired this society in utter apathy.
To accurately and concisely describe the state of affairs we are in now, I will offer two quotes (one I got clarified right here at slashdot):
I would add the quote "Those that stand for nothing, fall for anything" (author yet unknown to me), but the "irony" generation does profess to stand for something. What it is, Providence only knows. Let us look at this, shall we?
Ironic thinkers - those who eschew seriousness and approach life with jokes, pokes, and the 'laid back approach' - accuse their opposites of being intolerant, self-righteous hypocrites. But these same modern 'ironic' thinkers are the ones who brought us
Intolerance, hate, and the politics of division:
Fat bashing
Geek bashing
Religion bashing
Male bashing
Self-Righteousness:
"Get Over It" as the cure-all mantra for all manner of life traumas (abuse, molestation, etc.). What the 'ironic' thinkers forget, in this, is that everyone has issues - the profound lack of social support systems in modern society is as equally the fault of apathetic "I don't have time to listen to this, so get me my beer or get lost!" as it is the fault of Christian Repressionist "You must have demons inside you, let us drill a hole in your head to make it go away" ignorance.
To note: the 'irony' crowd tends to have a profound and sometimes verbally and physically violent reaction towards people in emotional distress. The irony of this is these same people then have nowhere to turn when they themselves are depressed or feel their life is in a rut. It is not uncommon that recreational drugs are then used to provide counsel.
Hypocrisy:
SUV owning activists gathering at Starbuck's to drive out to the "No War For Oil!" protest
I can discuss a multitude of other examples here, but I won't get into it.
Ultimately, apathy, the child of ironic thinking, is why we are seeing all of our rights being taken away by the RIAA and MPAA, etc. Apathy and the refusal to be serious about things, is why our politicians and corporations continue to practically dick we the people over with impugnity.
A populace that was more serious and less apathetic, would never allow such things to transpire for so long.
Of course, a really serious, and politically active populace, might be predisposed to frequent revolts, or to
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Native Americans were as much as warmongers as Europeans were, just less technologically advanced. Remember, they wanted to buy guns, they wanted the horses, and the whole tribal system was basically a male centered warrior cult mythology. If the Native Americans had invented calculus and sailing vessels first, they would have been spreading smallpox in Europe.
This is my sig.
a car representing a local collision repair business hit the back of a bus and completely wrecked the front end. My wife and I couldn't decide if it was an elaborate advertisement or just bone-headed driving. Nevertheless, it was pretty ironic.
Us "self-important" Brits (yes, all 65 million of us) tend to get slightly pissed off with the condescending way Americans (or some of them) assume that the entire population of the UK have either upper-class or Cockney accents and look down our noses at Americans!
Some of us are in fact well aware that a good deal of Americans (especially sitcom writers) are well-versed in irony, some a lot better than us (have you *seen* our hospital dramas? ER versus Casualty is really no debate).
The thing to be pointed out here is that self-importance on the part of a few Brits AND Americans is what started this "Irony Is Dead" thing in the first place. Sweeping statements never do anyone any good credibility-wise...
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
Some say he did, and want him impeached. Ironically, this time it is really "about lying" and "not about sex." Then again, maybe it isn't ironic. I am throroughly confused by the article as well. Of course I am an American... is that ironic? I give up :P.
A practitioner of gluttony is called a glutton; a practitioner of villainy is caled a villain; so by those criteria, God is an iron.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Every English-speaking, non-American learns shortly after birth that Americans don't understand irony. It's one of the things that makes US TV comedy in particular so ... um, "unintentionally funny" to the rest of us a lot of the time.
Of course, if you're reading this and you're American, no offence intended. After all, everyone knows you guys make the best TV shows.
Actually, Irony is where the Iranians come from.
The single most misused word I have come across is "literally"...
For instance: "His performance was so great! It literally blew me away."
Unless "he" was performing an imitation of a hurricane, the above use of "literally" is blatantly incorrect. Unfortuanately, all too often, "literally" is being used intechangeably with "really" and "absolutely", which is a real problem.
If fear it won't be long before "literally" is meaningless, and you won't have any way to telling someone you are not speaking figuratively.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Slashdot screencap
MTV's president didn't declare irony dead. Robert Thompson did on a Viacom program (which may or may not have appeard on MTV, it might have been VH1). I remember this because Rober Thompson is a media whore of the first order and anytime he pops up, I know the program using him was put together with a minimum of effort.
If you pay attention, you will see Thompson show up with eerie frequency any time a peice about the current culture is done. A quick Google news search for "robert Thompson" and Syracuse (the university at which he is employed) turns up 50 articles with quotes from this guy.
All this guy must do is sit around and answer the phone all day.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I remember reading a rant by C.S. Lewis describing this very thing...
That sounds like this one here (about three-quarters of the way down the page).
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Even sadder, my English teacher used that song as an example of irony.
Now THATS ironic. I think.
Sarcasm isn't rhetorical irony? Merriam-Webster make it sound a lot like it. "...2a the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning" That doesn't sound like sarcasm at all, does it? That also fits with the first definition in the Guardian article.
Perhaps the distinction is making an argument, or trying to point out a truth, rather than just a cheap joke. Some intention or belief at the bottom of it that carries it from a joke to an actual argument.
To me, that's the interesting part of this discussion of irony. I think many of these misuses of the word are defensible, using one definition or the other, but the thing that I find troublesome is that so often this claim of irony is accompanied by a refusal to acknowledge any sincere belief.
Mocking everything isn't irony. I think the modern (arguably inaccurate) idea of irony, with its affectation of nihilism, is a really interesting starting point for a social discussion. People will brag about what they don't believe, but won't talk about what they do believe, or display art that they pretend that they would be ashamed to really enjoy.
I think the problem is that people don't know what they believe. They don't even know that they believe anything. The canned answers are inadequate, but they manage neither to rationalize and complete these for themselves, or to find other things to believe in. They believe incoherent and contradictory things, and pretend belief in nothing. Unfortunately, believing nothing is just as useless a way to go through life as believing everything.
There is an attack that is often made on skeptics. "Oh, you don't believe in anything." However, the skeptics I know have unusually strong beliefs, and understand that their beliefs have implications in the world they live in. That is what makes them skeptics.
In this vein, there was a great article in Spy magazine about a decade ago on "irony". It even had Chevy Chase grinning on the cover and making the quote symbol with his fingers. I'll have to dig that up again.
I think this quote expresses it beautifully:
Simpsons, Homerpalooza
Teen1: Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool.
Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen1: I don't even know anymore.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Headline:
"PM4RK5, master of the inability to discern syntax from semantics, claims that an article about a word's definition is an article about grammar. Yawning ensues."
+1 Ironic
(or maybe -1 Ironic)
Ok, so now you basically Indians were forming rape gangs. Does the word, "savage" mean anything to you?
>but a large part of traditional warfare was >about nonlethal methods of capturing and >acquring new members for their tribe (a crucial >source of genetic diversity).
The fact that you are willing to overlook slavery in native americans while at the same time savaging europeans is ridiculous.
Besides, your whole basis of native americans being nice to each other is completely wrong. they hunted all the ice age big game to extinction. the aztecs and incas and mayans were all huge warmongers... every great native american civilization were butchers par excellent. but oh, they lost to the europeans, so, they must be saints.
by your logic, those poor germans were unjustly persecuted in world war II, and, all of that talk about the evils of national socialism is just a capitalist myth.
This is my sig.
The problem is, if Bush lied, then so did a good hunk of Democrats, so did the Germans, so did the French, hell, so did the entire UN, who all saw the same intelligence and all came to the same conclusion.
The general consensus before the war was, "there are probably some, but probably not a lot, and Saddam is a weasel bastard." The general consensus after the war is "there is probably none, possibly some, and Saddam is a weasel bastard." Of course, we can't "take back" back the war, anymore than we can "take back" anything else.
Now, it's time to deal with the facts. We are now a hostile occupier in a country the size of california. American resentment in Iraq before the war was high. It is growing. We're still bombing random vehicle caravans based on dodgy evidence that Saddam might be in one of them. We're still lining up people and shooting them in the head. In short, we "liberated" iraq the same way Germany "liberated" France
And, no... they did not all see the same intelligence. Intelligence communities do not just open their books to each other. The limited US intelligence we allowed the world to see was comical. Blix has called it shit. Even Powell called it shit. If that was the good intelligence, I can't imagine how awful the dodgy stuff we had was.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
500 Slashdotters trying too hard.
Read below (or above) before modding down...
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
a) demonstrate that the author has a better grasp of the meaning of irony than most people and thus establish her credibility as an authority on the matter;
and b) clarify the meaning of irony so as to avoid misusage in the future.
The author has, in fact:
a) contradicted herself on a number of occasions and chosen some poor examples of irony (normally "situational irony", which the author clearly hasn't quite got her head around);
and b) spawned a Slashdot article full of some terrible mis-uses of the word (but then perhaps that is not ironic, as we know that few Slashdotters actually read the articles anyway and one should expect the outcome).
My particular issue is with the statement:
"Naturally, irony was back within a few days, not least because of the myriad ironies contained within the attack itself (America having funded al-Qaida is ironic; America raining bombs and peanut butter on Afghanistan is ironic)."
Why is America's funding of al-Qaida ironic? It's not. America weren't funding them with any expectation that it would protect them from terrorist attacks. They weren't funding them with a view to reducing terrorism anywhere in the world. The outcome here isn't linked with any expectations. It's just a very black coincidence. Equally, why is the bombing of bombs and peant butter ironic? It's certainly contradictory, but ironic? I don't see the discrepancy between meaning and action there.
Personally, I think that the author might have benefitted from reading this article on the meaning of irony (and with useful links to a range of literary terms).
There were a few other areas that I didn't particularly agree with the article on, but a dissection of those does not make for a readable Slashdot comment. Still, I enjoyed it and it was definitely worthy of the label "News for Nerds". My brain has been pleasantly engaged (a thought, does Nerd necessarily == pedant?).
Oh, and btw, is the best use of irony in the article the statement in footnote 1?
"I would strongly urge you not to read any more footnotes, they are only here to make sure I don't get in trouble for plagiarising."
I am sure that successful irony shouldn't have to be flagged (as with the author's more fallible attempts in the main body of the article).
Cheerio,
BB
Just now I have realized the extent of the vaccuum left in Seinfeld's wake. And you know what.. I don't feel the least bit bad about it. Truly, we have witnessed the peak of entertainment television. I might live to be one hundred, and not experience the likes of this show again.
Situational irony occurs when the outcome of a situation is other than is expected. The key word here is EXPECTED - not just shitty. If you cease racing to avoid an accident and take up announcing at the track, we EXPECT that you have put yourself in a safer position. By not racing you are no longer in danger of being injured (or killed) by a race car accident.
The IRONY here is that, after the retiring, he *was* injured by a racecar, in less likely circumstances. That is situational irony.
Now, a very technical linguist might argue that there is assumed risk by simply being at the raceway, and what we're hearing is a tale of bad luck that might be humorous, but I'd refute that irony doesn't require the observer to take into account details. It's not a thesis, it's an outcome contrary to evidence that leads us in an exepcted direction.
What would make the situation more accetably ironic is if the ambulance, travelling at regular speeds on the way to the hospital, got into an accident and killed him.