Benefits of Sarcasm
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Professor Farnsworth: Is it true that stem cells may fight the aging process?
GeneWorks receptionist: Well yes. In the same way an infant may fight Muhammad Ali.
I like how the article points out that the over-arching caveat to the benefits of scarcasm involve the 'human capital' of trust. That reminds me of why my friends and I would use sarcasm with each other as games of wit, and why, on occasion, I'd cringe when one of my friends would be sarcastic, sometimes in a not-very-nice way, to a stranger who was simply trying to do their job. Or, in other words, sarcasm is a very powerful weapon in the "put down" game, and a large swath of the population isn't really mentally equipped or practiced in the contest, so it's a belitting thing...but when sarcasm ace meets sarcasm ace, holy cow it can be some funny material.
Also known as British Humor.
Maybe we should call this a Monty Python scenario.
I really enjoy irony in life and in literature, so I try to avoid sarcasm as to not cheapen the fun of "higher" forms of irony (like finally understanding Alanis Morisette's "Ironic").
Would you mind explaining the deeper meaning of Morissette's song?
None of the examples in the song are actually ironic (i.e. taking an action with the intention of causing A which actually prevents A [or vise versa]). "Rain on your wedding day" isn't ironic, as "getting married" isn't attempting to prevent rain.
However, writing a song that's supposed to be chock-full of ironic things where not a single one actually demonstrates irony IS ironic.
So the song is meta-irony.
Actually most (if not all) of the examples in the song are actually ironic. And the example given above is not the sole definition of irony (but could be an ironic situation).
From the dictionary:
(a) the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.
(b) a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result.
The "10000 spoons when you all you need is a knife" is obvious with the latter example.
As for the "rain on your wedding day", it fairly obviously presupposes the expectation (of the "stereotypical" woman planning her wedding) that it would be some perfect sunny day.
E.g. imagine a bride to be planning her reception, and after weeks full of summer sun, it pours like crazy in her wedding day ("a state of affairs (...) deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result") -- it's this feeling like the universe is mocking you, like you know, the weather changed on purpose.
Of course a song has to tell those things elliptically, and people expect to see irony either in the form of (a -- most comments I've seen allude to that) or in a blatantly explicit (b).
Being stuck without a spoon to stir your tea in a spoon factory would be ironic.
It's like good advice you just can't take? No?
Rain on one's wedding day isn't by itself ironic (in England for example it would be par for the course, as it almost always rains anyway).
But it can be, under certain expectations (e.g. an expectation and preparations for a ceremony with nice weather, sudden rain ESPECIALLY on that day, when it was all well and sunny for weeks before, etc).
There are several definitions of irony, and as far as I can tell, that's not any of them. The threefold division into verbal, situational, and dramatic irony presented in Wikipedia [0] seems reasonably typical. The song is overtly about situational irony, and the examples are all -- as would be expected -- situational irony (though in a few of the cases this is only apparent when you consider normal, but unstated, thought processes or planning that is likely to have occurred by the people in the events described; when describing a situation in half-dozen words, there is quite a lot of implicit context), and the longest example also features verbal irony in interior monologue of the subject of the example.
(And the delivery of the last stanza strongly suggest that the last two lines are, themselves, verbal irony.)
The usual complaints about the song not being ironic seem to result from restricting the definition of "irony" to dramatic irony, which the song doesn't feature (except perhaps in the longest example, where given the context of the situational irony of the previous examples and the initial setup, the eventual outcome is clear to the listener from the start.)
You'd expect the lyrics to be ironic.
Alanis Morissette is either not that smart, or a complete and utter genius.
And no I'm not ignoring Occam's razor here...Morissette is a talented songwriter, which likely means she is also a decent student of literary technique...and even if she weren't, what is the statistical probability that _all_ of the dozen or so "ironic" situations that she chose to enumerate in "Ironic" could fall short of irony in exactly the kind of way that annoys the shit out of everyone who knows the actual definition of irony?
(and no, I was not smart or cool enough to understand this at the time of the song's popularity, or even the decade afterward...I'm pretty sure I read this insight off of Reddit or a blog's comment section, which is probably itself an ironic thing)
It's sort of shocking this five-letter word turned out to have several simultaneous different non-overlapping meanings, with so many people not even realizing the differences in the way other people were using the word. There's probably a PhD thesis in there somewhere. No joke, irony, or sarcasm.
Edit: Wow - never occurred to me that this might have been the point of the song.
Most of them have this dictionary definition in mind: "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect."
But they seem to forget the other meaning, probably because they never bothered to check the lemma in their dictionary:
"a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result"
The first case is "being ironic". The second is about the inherent "irony" in certain situations.
That you never seem to find something (e.g. a beer opener) when you need it, and you chance upon it anytime you don't do is a mild example of the latter.
As is getting presented with or chancing upon "ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife".
The situation of "ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife" is not "deliberately contrary" to "what one expects". It may be contrary to what one wants...but that's not the same thing...otherwise, virtually every disappointment in life could be described as "ironic".
So finding "ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife" is not ironic, but frustrating. However, what would be ironic is if the narrator later realized that what she had actually needed was a spoon (because by the time she found a knife, all the steak was gone and only soup was left, perhaps)...and her frustration at finding 10,000 spoons was a fortuitous opportunity that she squandered.
If you found a couple of spoons when you searched for a knife, that would be merely frustrating ("damn, where's a knife when you need it?"). It's also close to what you'd deliberately expect ("I either find some knife, or I find some other cutlery but no knife").
Getting 10,000 of them but no fucking knife is not just frustrating but also ironic -- and outside of expectations.
It agrees to a T with:
"a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result"
One would expect to either find the knife, or find a some other cutlery but no knife.
Chancing upon 10,000 cutlery items and ALL of them being spoons --just the kind you don't need-- seems both "deliberately contrary to what one expects" and "wryly amusing".
(Note that it doesn't have to BE "deliberately contrary" -- just to "seem" so, e.g. as when you feel that luck or the universe conspires against you).
Ironic.
>Words mean whatever their users intend.
Words mean whatever MOST users intend, sure. But that's not entirely arbitrary, and doesn't mean there's not also abuse.
E.g. there are also lots of of people who genuinely can't tell "their" from "they're". The English language isn't gonna change anytime soon to accommodate their usage of it.
>My favourite recent example of this is 'literally' which once meant "actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy" and has now come to also mean it's direct opposite: "in effect; in substance; very nearly; virtually".
Yeah, that use has been included in dictionaries for a while -- and the use of "literally" to mean "virtually" goes back to even before Shakespeare.
In general modern dictionaries stay well on top of language trends. If there's a word usage that's not included yet, it's probably either a fad or too recent and constrained to deserve an entry (like "putting the p.... on the chainwax").
Another classic example, "awful" is said to originally mean "worthy of awe" back in the day...
Properly speaking, sarcasm often uses verbal irony, but sarcasm does not necessarily involve irony. Though maybe that definition is changing; its not that uncommon to see "sarcasm" used as if it were equivalent to verbal irony.
One of my favorite old Usenet .sig lines.
Or the common variation: “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.”
So it may be that your teacher was just messing with you.
Who really has the presence of mind and self control to use sarcasm with "care and moderation" when in the midst of a work-related social interaction? I think this is just a silly extrapolation to draw from the evidence presented.
Sarcasm can be amusing and perhaps useful in satire and social settings where there's no risk of generating animosity between people, but in the workplace where relationships don't necessarily arise from a sense of mutual understanding, I think this article gives us little reason to believe it can do more good than harm.
Even to the extent that is true, which I could quibble with, the sarcasm can be at the sarcastic one's expense, as a form of self-deprecation, or it could be at the expense of a person not present and one who may not even properly-speaking exist.
Sarcasm at a coworker's expense isn't wrong because it's sarcasm, it would be wrong because any social interaction at a coworker's expense is generally wrong.
Other than that bit, what you've written doesn't conflict with what I wrote. Even if sarcasm is used at the expense of nonexistent parties, it stands a reasonable chance of making those who don't know you well wary.
One illustration from my own life: I was very sarcastic as a younger person, but generally had no malicious intent. Once I thought I was getting along quite well with a girl, who was laughing at some of my sarcastic remarks. At the end of the evening, she stormed out of the room, upset after I made yet another sarcastic comment. This came to the great surprise of me and others in the group who knew me better. Here there was no evil intended on either side, yet sarcasm combined with the intrinsic difficulty in understanding another person created a very uncomfortable and socially destructive situation.
There is the thought-dulling sarcasm common on the internet that is equivalent to preaching to the choir in reverse, "It's ok, congress is on it" or "Another cold day, so much for global warming." Similar is the the teenager's use of mocking sarcasm as a blunt act of defiance.
Then there is the playful language that makes the listener try to inhabit the mind of the speaker and likely does generate creative thought, such as the article's example “Pat, don’t work so hard!”
Finally, sarcasm can be used to express ideas that, if said bluntly, would be unacceptable. A boss can tell a recently-berated employee, "the customer is always right" as a way of commiserating with the employee without directly discrediting the customer. Or a coworker can say "Another good policy decision from management" and gauge the listener's reaction without directly revealing their own opinion.
Pinker on shared vs mutual knowledge, the value of ambiguity: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pinker/files/evolutionary_s...
I can't tell if the comments thus far are sarcastic.
I'm convinced this type of rhetoric forces an additional cognitive load on the child's brain that helps with context, perspective, and self-awareness which in my mind, are the absolute most powerful aspects of becoming an intelligent individual. This is sort of the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as well and is the most important "gateway" concept when teaching anyone anything.