--- Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote: > See > http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001941.html > for a recent discussion. > > > From my comment: > > In Modern English Usage, Fowler gives a fairly simple definition: > > Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, > consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not > understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets > the ear, is aware, both of that "more" and of the outsider's > incomprehension. > > He goes on to list three main categories of irony: Socratic irony > (Socrates pretends ignorance to manipulate the dogmatists and to amuse > his > followers), dramatic irony (the point being that Sophocles's audience > knew the story already), This seems to be related the irony that Paarfi mentions in his treatment of Tazendra--the reader is amused to understand things that she doesn't and see her differently from the way she sees herself. > and irony of fate (the idea being that most people > ignorantly expect an orderly or a cooperative natural world but we the > clued in don't). He says it's important not to apply "irony of fate" to > every "trivial oddity" - which rules out the wedding day example in my > book. And Richard's situation isn't ironic in my view - if we knew > that a horse would cause the kingdom's downfall it might be, but as is > it's just tragic. > > Anyway, this article is largely based, but also expands, on Fowler: > > http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Irony ... Good answer and good link. This topic comes up in alt.usage.english now and then. At the risk of quoting myself, I'm going to quote myself on some minor topics that that article didn't address. begin quotation from <http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z27541788>------ Martin Ambuhl <mambuhl at earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<3DEDC180.3010105 at earthlink.net>... > ' wrote: > > Sarcastic, ironic, and sardonic are often listed as synonyms, but they > > are not the same. Can you explain how they differ? Note that I wish > > to go beyond the dictionary definitions here, to how the words are > > actually used. > > Unless you have a very poor dictionary, there is no need to go beyond > "dictionary definitions." I disagree completely. Many actual uses of these words don't correspond to dictionary definitions. Alanis Morissette's, for example. At the other end of the intellectual spectrum [*], there's Richard Rorty, one of the most eminent living American philosophers. His definition of the term "ironist" is quoted at <http://www.uta.edu/english/rcct/E5311/notes3.html>, among other places. "I use 'ironist' to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires--someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease." Here, as elsewhere in my experience, "irony" seems to refer to an attitude of looking for and mocking incongruities--thus not taking anything too seriously or (in this case) finding flaws in any claim that beliefs are "beyond the reach of time and chance". I can't find that definition in the AHD, MWCD10, or NSOED. My favorite dictionary definition for "ironic" in the situational sense is the one from NSOED. Matti quoted it at <http://makeashorterlink.com/?D14636CA2> earlier this year. "... a contradictory or ill-timed outcome of events as if in mockery of the fitness of things." end quotation------------ The whole thread, and other threads you can find by searching Google Groups for alt.usage.english irony, may be of interest. Jerry Friedman __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/