tsuwm mentioned the possibility of someone's asking for the definition of irony on another thread. (I'd mentioned that I value an ironic sense of humor.)

There have been volumes written about irony, and the subject is redolent with human fun, foibles and even tragedy.

I thought it might be interesting to enumerate here examples of different types of irony, variously categorized according to your references. I think it was ironic that Einstein with his own brand of genuis is purported to have been escorted to classes by students because he wouldn't find the way. (This is an example of irony's ability to admire with veiled light criticism.)

Irony can take even grim turns and still maintain an element of humor. Here are two examples from the web:

"A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current, she whacked him with a handy plank of wood by the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Till that moment he had been happily listening to his Walkman."

"The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later they were both eaten by a killer whale."

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/irony.html

Literature is rife with examples of irony, both humorous and tragic. Dramatic irony throughout "Oedipus Rex" comes immediately to mind.

Beethoven's life of genuis and brilliance in music took the ironically tragic turn when he became deaf, though continuing his composition.

It's a certain kind of irony (I'll have to look up the exact term) that Beverly Sills' daughter is deaf.

So, sometimes poignant, sometimes tragic, often humorous, what are some, if any, examples of irony playing out its hand you've observed in either life or the arts?

I hope someone else has a few examples.

Best regards,
WW

Is it irony to call this irony?

Silva Rhetoricae http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm defines irony as Speaking in such a way as to imply the contrary of what one says, often for the purpose of derision, mockery, or jest.

So what is the correct term for what Dub Dub' defined?

Dear Faldage: "stochastic" is a very interesting word, and not an easy word to define. I believe that many participants of AWADtalk would be interested to see your definition of it .

In reply to:

---

Silva Rhetoricae http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm defines irony as Speaking in such a way as to imply the contrary of what one says, often for the purpose of derision, mockery, or jest.
So what is the correct term for what Dub Dub' defined?

---

irony as a figure of speech is as you defined it, but there are two other types:

2. irony in the figurative sense: a condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things (tragic irony, in F. ironie du sort).
3. irony in the etymological sense: dissimulation, pretence; esp. in reference to the dissimulation of ignorance practiced by Socrates as a means of confuting an adversary (Socratic irony).

the Greek root means dissimulation, ignorance purposely affected; the figurative sense has come about through, some might say, misuse; but even here it was originally used in a more classical sense: The contrast between man with his hopes, fears, wishes, and undertakings, and a dark, inflexible fate, affords abundant room for the exhibition of tragic irony.

the leap from Thomas Hardy's Life's Little Ironies to Alanis Morrissette's "Isn't it Ironic" is a big one.

http://www.ebooks3.com/cgi-bin/ebooks/ebook.cgi?folder=lifes_little_ironies&next=1

http://www.saywhat.sphosting.com/a/alanisironic.shtml

The humour in irony is usually only perceived readily by third parties. Using the example of the seals prepared as food for the killer whales, while we may think it's funny (and it was; I remember reading the report), I'm sure that the people who cared for the seals and then released them didn't find it one bit funny ... at the same time, they may well have recognised the irony implicit in the situation!

Dear Faldage: it is stercoraceous that you withhold your definition of stochastic.

Faldage,

I haven't defined anything; I've simply provided examples of ironic situations. I checked your rhetoric site, by the way. Thanks for providing it. The information on irony doesn't include any mention of the common terms for types of irony. Situational irony is pretty standard--but there are at least two others, perhaps three.

On the rhetoric site, specific types of verbal irony have been defined, and they're worth examining.

Best regards,
WW

crosswinds,

most of the "ironies" in Morrissette's song shouldn't be classified as ironies at all. but maybe you agree....

tsuwm: I first only knew a few of the lyrics that weren't ironic, but I just clicked on the site you provided and some of those examples are ironic. "Raining on your wedding day" I don't see as being ironic, however--just a turn in the weather. I've read much of Hardy, but not Life's Little Ironies...I will take a look.

The examples I listed in the first post are examples of various types of irony, but certainly not in the strictly classical sense. I don't see any purpose in restricting here a discussion of irony and its examples to the classic definition unless that's what posters here would rather do. If we did, it would make the task more challenging, but enlightening. I'd have to work like the devil to restrict my wildfire's range of what I view as irony into modest candlelight.

I wish we had some excellent examples here on the thread. When Kate in Taming of the Shrew is played very well, her final soliloquy about the role of the wife works best (and only well, in my opinion) if delivered with an ironic tone of voice. If delivered otherwise--with saccharine obsequiousness, for example--I want to spit in her eye.

Anyway, I'll keep my fingers crossed (the ones that are awkwardly gripping this stochastic iron with which I try to poke the embers of the ironic fire), and maybe something will flare up.

Best regards,
WildFire

tsuwm: You mentioned Dennis Miller in another thread, so I just went to the site and read the bit on Gotham...

In order to scare off the monarch, the Wise Men of Gotham, as they came to be known, feigned madness, setting about such tasks as trying to drown eels and building a fence around their so-called "cuckoo bush" to trap the birds, which of course flew away. Faced with such complete zaniness, King John detoured around the eel-drowning town and Gotham was spared the expense of playing host to him.

These tales of the "foles of Gotham" spread and were eventually collected and published in the 16th century. In calling New York "Gotham," Irving was pointing out a similar "method to the madness" of the city's inhabitants, who acted foolishly so that outsiders would leave them alone.

There is irony in New York's being referred to as Gotham once you know the story of its historical archetype because, whatever kind of madness New Yorkers may feign, it's not working. Ironically, it is often the madness of New York that pulls 'em in. (I just got an image of that naked cowboy on the corner of Time Square, playing his guitar...) If word got around that there were New Yorkers building fences around bushes to keep the birds in, the thrill seekers would go there, too, to be amazed.

Wouldn't there be irony in calling a trailer, "Buckingham Palace"? And a dirty, drunk, swearing woman comes to the door of the trailer and someone continues the ironic tale by saying, "And this is the Queen." Even more ironic would be the queen referring to herself as such...and so on. Sometimes, not always, irony and exaggeration overlap.

Thanks for unknowingly providing an inspiration for an observation on the subject at hand.

WW

Here's our past discussion:
http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=wordplay&Number=33942

1. iron-knee
2. steel-knee
3. tin-knee

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.htm

Might mycterismus be used with humorous intent of an ironic
observation?

Attempting to be less stochastic, assuming stochasticism may be considered here to be relative
WW

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

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.

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

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!

>...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.

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

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".

Hello, tsuwm...

I clicked on your link to Fussell and ended up on the first page of this thread... (Makes me think my computer did a bob...three curves and a twiddle. Gosh! Am I going to enjoy dropping that one, if not ironically, certainly whimsically!)

Back to stochastically: wwh, I like hearing terms from science transferred to other fields! Even though I don't understand the physics of the draft effect in racing, its essence is easily transferred to those situations in which the efforts of two bodies are increased to such an extent that neither could have accomplished what the two could have alone. And so on. In Faldage's case, even if stochastic hadn't been used heretofore rhetorically, there's calculated resonance in his application here and even ironic resonance by doing so: definition of what irony isn't by inculcation of a numerical application. At least so it seems to me with my subjective, dull understanding of irony.

Best regards,
WW

regarding the link: I think i fixed it -- too many windows open I guess.

regarding stochastic - yet more complaining about the transferral of sense, in this case misapplied because the *original* sense of stochastic (from the Greek root meaning "to aim at a mark, guess") is to aim at a mark, guess.
this was "borrowed" for technical use in science and music, only to be claimed anew by the foi-poloi[sic].

tsuwm: I misspelled stochastic as stochistic, edited my post, but the error will continue forever in your Re:Stochistic response, where your own text is correct. If you want to go back and fix my miss in it, great.

But, more to the point and another pointed point, how do composers use stochasticism (if that's a word)? I, too, in looking up the word, noticed that the root was related to a point. It's ironic, isn't it, that that same point has come to mean a random variable.

Best regards,
WW

regarding musical use: b. Mus. Applied (orig. by Yannis Xenakis (b. 1922), Romanian-born Greek composer) to music in which the overall sound structure is determined, but internal details are left to chance or are established mathematically by composer or computer (by the laws of probability or otherwise).

regarding 'stochistic': it seems apt that I should leave your random misspell for a spell, wordmiss.

A good illustration of irony is being blessed with a voice like Barbra Streisand, and then being scared to death of going onstage to sing in front of an audience.

Whitman...Could we ever go on and on about professional musicians who've been world class performers, but possessed of performance anxiety to the max. I read somewhere that Melba, the opera diva, threw up before each performance. Then she was fine.

tsuwm: Thanks so very much for your magnanimous gesture of rescuing me from myself (she said ironically with a highly arched eyebrow...)....

WW

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."

Dear tsuwm: Paul Fussell sounds fuzzled to me.

I just love it when y'all attempt to impute meaning to my stochastic ramblings. Makes me feel like I'm doing my job.

I just love it when y'all attempt to impute meaning to my stochastic ramblings
Glad to oblige, F.

Dear Faldage: You have missed your calling. You should be a CIA disinformation specialist.

As Christmas approaches, I am reminded of one of my favorite examples of irony in literature: O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi.