Irony

From StoneHome

Okay. So, there are two ways to get to this document. If you got here browsing around the web page, the following rant doesn't apply to you. But, if this was given to you as a link from IRC or whatever, chances are you're faced with some arrogant prick gritting his teeth insisting that something which seems clearly ironic somehow isn't. Because I'm that arrogant prick, and because I happen to be writing this while calm, I'll take the time to explain that you happen to have stumbled across possibly my biggest linguistic pet peeve (with a possible contender in decimate.)

This rant (well, this iteration of this rant, at least) comes from the events that also spawned Web Dictionaries Are The Devil and Ignorance Isn't Linguistic Drift.

Note to common belief: go to hell. That's not what irony is.

It's sort of disappointing that cartoons like Futurama and Stand Alone Complex handle this correctly, whereas things which should be well edited such as History Channel specials and literary review frequently do not.

What irony isn't

Let's be clear. Irony is one of those words whose meaning is not even related to what most people expect. I have trouble putting my estimation of the public misapprehensions of irony into clear terms, as the lines are somewhat vague, but it seems like anything which could be answered with Nelson's laugh somehow or another ends up getting labelled ironic.

Irony is not about reciprocity. If person A does thing X, and somehow it comes back and bites them in the ass, that is not ironic. If something happens to someone which would have been preventable had they not done some awful thing they did, that's not ironic. There is no irony in catching someone doing what they told others not to do, nor is there irony in something happening after someone suggested it wouldn't/couldn't. There is no irony in someone aspiring to better someone else by improving one facet and ending up with an even lesser result. There is no irony in trying to prevent something and thereby accelerating or worsening it. There is no irony in a situation being supported solely by the belief in a preconception about said situation. These things are coincidental, karmic, synchronous, biting, chiding, bittersweet, concurrent, foreshadowed, predictable, correspondant, cruel, telescoped and even occasionally educational. They are not ironic.

What irony is

Irony is the use of words in a way to conceal true intention with literal intention. More clearly, irony is when you say one thing but mean another. Much subtext, many puns, and quite a bit of sarcasm and slander are dependant on irony. When someone gets a new awful haircut and asks you what you think, and you say that it's "a real good 'do" (using "do" to mean she was done over, ie didn't get her money's worth,) you've used irony - whether or not it's obvious probably determines whether you get yelled at. Similarly, if a plot involves a famous person with a dirty secret, and the famous person asks another character if a third person knows who they are, then a response "Oh, she knows exactly who you are" to answer what the famous person would want to hear but really to mean "she and I know your secret and you're not fooling us" would be the use of irony.

Many of Shakespeare's comedies, primarily those relying on verbal games and character confusion, are heavily dependant on lies told "honestly" via irony, or mistakes made either through unintentional irony or reverse irony (the listener taking words in a way other than they were meant, such as every sitcom since The Taming of The Shrew, when every attempt at a compliment somehow ends up digging Our Hero™ deeper into his pit, or person B misinterpreting instructions or requests.

In this fashion, it's easy to see that Laurel and Hardy rely heavily on irony despite having comedy almost bereft of coincidences, whereas Seinfeld (whose comedy is constructed almost entirely out of happenstance and unlikelihood) actually uses comparatively little irony - pretty much only when he's lying through his teeth, though George uses it heavily. When someone fails and another says "good job, man," that's irony in its simplest form: they mean something other than the superficial intent of the words. When someone dies in the collapse of a bridge from which they'd gotten rich by embezzelling funds earmarked for safety mechanisms, that's not at all ironic. However, when another party looks over the edge of the bridge at the crippled and dying embezzler's body, and says "hey, good thinking stealing those guide rails," that's irony well placed.

Etymology

Irony is believed to have been imported to English from the Latin ironia in 1502, in turn from the Greek eironeia, a conjugation of eiron - to dissemble, such as lying by omission or by concealment of true intent. During the word's Latin use, the lie by omission was dropped from its meaning; ironia is simply lying by concealment of true intent (some group these two actions under the term affected ignorance.) On conversion to english, this definition has been expanded to include not only lies, but some jokes of subtlety.

It is important to bear this history in mind when one attempts to nail down what irony is, as it clears up why the word means specifically things phrased to bury connotation behind denotation. Irony has nothing to do with something coming back to haunt one; it's about doubletalk, two-faced speech and the sly underpinnings of sarcasm and trickery through misphrased honesty.

Bad Habits

It seems common to believe that the common usage accepts another definition of irony, something which is generally vaguely indicated in the rant above. In fact, a few of the god-awful web dictionaries, run by people which have neither training nor experience in linguistics, have picked the alternate up as if it was common, and two have even gone as far as to adopt the phrase "Morisettan irony" to handwave away what one of the Webster name variants attempted to handwave away twenty years ago as "dramatic irony." Neither of these phrases carry any weight in literature whatsoever, and one will be extremely hard pressed to find the misuse of irony in edited books - even most biographies run through better publishers are devoid of this error. Moreover, I have as yet been unable to find any examples of this misuse of the term irony in anything even remotely authoritarian (take your zines and stuff them) going back before the early 1970s, nor has anyone been able to suggest such a thing to me. The earliest nonauthoritarian thing anyone's shown me using Irony in this mistaken fashion is a home-published cookbook from the late 1960s; if that's enough to change the language on, we might as well change the language to read "i ain't gotta axe you a question" right now.

Lately, there's this nasty trend for people to suggest that because a mistake is in common use, it is somehow suddenly correct by reflection through common usage in some misguided interpretation of linguistic drift within a live language. Ignorance isn't linguistic drift. Mistakes come and mistakes go; changes to the language take hundreds of years, and this particular buffoonery isn't yet extant even in three seperate generations. Never you worry: people will find out what irony means just as they found out what nuclear meant (many people thought nuclear simply implied a kind of explosive in the 60s and 70s.) Besides, language change is almost always creative, and almost never reformulative. If that doesn't make sense to you, chances are you shouldn't be arguing about the progressive change in languages any more than someone which doesn't know what o(n log n) means should discuss the impact of algorithm selection or than someone which isn't aware that gasoline does not contain octane should be discussing fuel mixtures.

It's time for people to realize that linguistics is a Real Science™, and that just because language changes doesn't mean that they're correctly interpreting language changing. Most people which think that they've found a new geological fault really found a sinkhole, mine droppage, or felt the shake from nearby explosions, digging or large building collapse. Most people which think that they've found a new energy source are just misunderstanding the physical mechanism by which energy they're seeing is being generated. Most people that think they've solved a classic mathematics problem are just missing a tiny but critical detail which breaks their proof. Still, when one tells one of those people that they've made a mistake, they generally accept their error once displayed on the basis that they're not geologists / physicists / mathematicians. That said, when one points out that someone's misusing a word, suddenly everyone thinks they're an Oxford lexicographer, quite within their rights to discuss the morphological trends of the english lexicon, even though they generally don't know what lexica or morphology are, nor even realize that there are criteria for adopting a new denotation or slang trend.

In the meantime, stop learning your words out of dictionaries, let alone bottom-of-the-barrel web dictionaries run by god only knows who. One cannot learn correct usage of a word through a two-sentence overview. Words have a complex and important relation and usage to other words whose depth generally could not be adequately explained in an article, let alone a numbered list of terse sentences. Dictionaries are there to remind one of details, as well as to confirm spellings and settle Scrabble arguments. Learn English through literature or not at all. Trying to pretend to yourself and others that a blurb from a random jackass which claims to be an authority on the web (yes, m-w.com are random jackasses) is nothing but a way to delude one's self and to confuse or annoy others.

References

• As is so often the case, this and other concepts can be learned via a thorough course in Futurama (search for irony in three significantly different parts of the script for giant cluebulb.)
• Doug Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary