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1. iron-knee
2. steel-knee
3. tin-knee
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Thanks for the link, Jackie. Back to Faldage's... His provided a term for an ironic device that we've certainly observed, but the term was new to me. I quote: " mycterismus Also sp. mycterismus, micterismus subsannatio fleering frumpe A mock given with an accompanying gesture, such as a scornful countenance. Example In some smiling sort looking aside or by drawing the lip awry or shrinking up the nose, as he had said to one whose words he believed not, 'No doubt, sir, of that' -- Puttenham" http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htmMight mycterismus be used with humorous intent of an ironic observation? Attempting to be less stochastic, assuming stochasticism may be considered here to be relativeWW
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Fiberbabe observes on the link on irony Jackie provided:
Some time ago, a Harvard English professor (or someone of similar stature who seems to get paid for doing these sorts of things) put together a treatise about how, technically, none of the citations in that song illustrated irony at all. The pithy & brilliant comment that I took away from it was "None of those qualify as irony - the best that any of them can be described is a bummer."
Go Harvard.
...wish we had a link to this prof's arguments. If you observed a person taking a cigarette break under a "No Smoking" sign, unbeknownst to the smoker, wouldn't that be ironic?
WW
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I find it exceedingly ironic, that in a board devoted to the study of words, the word "Stochastic" has been used several times without being defined. I defy the perptrators to show that the word as used makes any sense.
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Hello, wwh...
The only definitions I have of stochastic are: l.involving a random variable; 2.involving chance or probability.
I took Faldage's use of stochastic to imply that the term ironic is so broadly used, that its general features, so used, appear to be random, opperative word random.
If I misread Faldage, I beg to be set straight.
Best regards,
WW
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Dr. Bill, I will combine into Wordwind's definition of stochastic that it means also: by guesswork or by chance.
Therefore it would make sense to me that Faldage might have meant that determining what constitutes irony is highly subjective, depending upon (hi, M!) what an individual's experiences and intrinsic mind-set are.
WW, I like that mycterismus word you found. I do hope it's a real word--my little mind has quite enough trouble keeping up with the new real words--I haven't any brain cells to spare to try and learn made-up ones! But it sounds like a combination of mystery, rictus (mind-leap, here), and miasma: quite intriguing!
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>...wish we had a link to this prof's arguments.
Professor emeritus of English, Paul Fussell discusses the use (and non-use) of irony in the words of songs on the best-selling album of pop singer Alanis Morissette in an article in The Washington Post. The album itself is called "Ironic" but Fussell found very little irony in the lyrics. Fussell had never heard the record but liked some of the lyrics after they were read to him. "Those are some pretty nice words," he said. "It's good for what it is. It's sardonic, and very little pop culture is." As for irony, Fussell found some situational irony in the songs but no rhetorical irony. "Rhetorical irony requires immense intellectual self-respect," he explained, "you have to be more or less brilliant to get rhetorical irony."
notes:
this is from the "Penn Arts & Sciences" newsletter. I suppose more than one prof may have tackled this thorny issue, but this should be in the Washington Post archives.
"more or less brilliant"... heh.
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from "A Conversation with Paul Fussell: Hackney: Why would you say that war is ironic rather than heroic?
Fussell: It's ironic because everybody believes that life is pleasurable, and they should. They have a right to believe that, especially if they're brought up under a Constitution that talks about the pursuit of happiness. To have public life shot through with that kind of optimism and complacency is the grounds for horrible, instructive irony when those generalities prove not true. War tends to prove them not true. War is about survival and it's about mass killing and it's about killing or being killed -- that is, in the infantry -- and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don't fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony.
for those interested in the entire Conversation: http://raven.cc.ukans.edu/~kansite/ww_one/comment/fussell.htm
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Dear Jackie et al.: Stochastic refers in a decidedly technical way to chance, in the design of statistical and mathematic operations.
sto[chas[tic 7stb kas4tik, st!38
adj.
5< Gr stochastikos, proceeding by guesswork, lit., skillful in aiming < stochazesthai, to aim at < stochos, a target: for IE base see STING6
1 of, pertaining to, or arising from chance; involving probability; random
2 Math. designating a process in which a sequence of values is drawn from a corresponding sequence of jointly distributed random variables
I think it is a pretentious misuse of a technical word such as "stochastic" when it does nothing to facilitate the reader's understanding, and in fact is certain to baffle the reader. As if I referred to your "calcaneus" instead of saying "heel".
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