What is irony? With examples | Hacker News Reader

What is irony? With examples

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48 pointsColinWright45 comments

One of the ways that British English and US English differ seems to be in the intentionality of 'irony'. In US English, it's perfectly acceptable for an intended situation to be ironic: "I put on a t-shirt with an ironic slogan, before heading out for coffee". In British English, the mere act of intending the result means that the result is expected... and therefore not ironic.

I first realised this when I heard some Americans say of a photo "The photographer has positioned the model's foot ironically". This phrase does not really scan in British English because the photographer intended the effect.

Note also that intention is different to awareness - the War on Drugs is intended to reduce crime, but a law enforcement participant can be fully aware of the irony that it actually increases crime. It remains ironic because it's not intended to increase crime, but to reduce it.

This differentiation is not something I've seen in the definitions, but something I've observed from usage. It seems also that a lot of people use 'irony' as a term when they should be using 'sarcasm'.

I've always found this debate a bit pedantic.

The definitions listed include, "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result."

It's an odd definition to showcase to make the point that irony doesn't merely mean "the unexpected."

The prescriptivists should note that they've been losing this fight over usage since around the 1640s. And even if Alanis was the first to use the word in this way, there's another very strict rule of English: you may extend the meanings of words wherever you damn well please. If the extension is likely to cause confusion about your intended meaning, that's on you.

I will posit that no use of the word 'ironic' to mean 'unexpected' has ever confused anyone, except as to whether or not they should be an ass by pointing out how much more they know about what's proper than the speaker.

Wouldn't that mean bad grammar and misspellings are also fine?

That's how languages evolve.

This doesn't mean that language should not be rigorously taught to children, if only for the rigor.

The point of language is to convey meaning and make sense, not to conform to grammatical rules.

If the correct sense is made and the intended meaning conveyed, yet a rule is broken, that means there's a problem with the rule -- not with the usage.

You missed out a letter (and a space) on "Would not".

> Has Alanis Morissette spoiled irony for us forever? Perhaps my generation is just in recovery from her 1995 lyrics. What do you think – do you understand the meaning of irony? Do people around you?

I personally believe in the theory that the fact that none of the examples in "Ironic" are actually ironic is what makes it all ironic. So despite what the OP implies, Alanis Morissette has actually pulled a good one over most listeners.

Side note: One of the exchanges I remember most from my high school English classes was when our teacher taught us the meaning of irony and someone asked, "Is sarcasm irony?". My teacher paused and said, "Kind of, but it's the lowest form of irony". The more I think about it, the more apt that description seems.

I like Ed Byrne's standup bit where he finds increasingly outlandish ways to interpret the song that actually are ironic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1TVSTkAXg

He did a bit of that routine on the same stage as her once [1].

I don't buy the above theory because if looks could kill, that would have been the end of Ed Byrne.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/3678531....

I like Baldrik's definition of irony: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awD1gtpdWIA

Your teacher got it wrong. Sarcasm is not irony and the saying goes that "sarcasm is the lowest Form of humour".

However, an English teacher teaching others what irony is and getting it wrong is ironic.

Nah. She just screwed up and that's a post facto explanation for it.

Actually, the one where the guy is afraid of flying, avoids it his whole life and then crashes the first time he actually flies is ironic. I think you'd be right if none of the situations were ironic, but the fact that one is really ruins it for me.

I disagree about it being ironic. Unless, in order to overcome his fear of flying, he decided to learn how to become a pilot, and crashed on his first lesson after the instructor said "now you have a go, Bob".

If he finally decided to take a flight because the plane proclaimed to be uncrashable, then it would be pretty ironic, no?

The examples in her song are situational irony: something different from (opposite to) what you expect (want).

My understanding:

Situational irony involves expected outcomes, not just expectations. So, rain on your wedding day? That's not an outcome- you didn't cause the rain! Now on the other hand, if your boss tries to fire you and winds up fired himself instead of you, that would be situational irony, because the result of his actions are opposite what he expected.

It's not ironic if it rains on YOUR wedding day, but it would be ironic if it rained on a weatherman's wedding day. That's the difference between bad luck and irony.

A rainy day is a bad day, full of dark skies, miserable wetness, mud, and poor opportunities for taking pictures. A wedding day is a good day, full of hope and promise and new life, a day in which you'd like to go outside with other people. So rain on a wedding day is ruining what is supposed to be a good day. (Assuming you fall into the mindset that rain and weddings don't mix.) If it weren't, then why do people arrange to have weddings during the dry months of the year?

Yes, but as we are discussing, that doesn't make it ironic!

By choosing to hold the wedding on a day when the sun is likely to shine, you have influence over the outcome, and the expected result is a wedding without rain.

It wouldn't be ironic for it to rain in Seattle in January on your wedding day.

The theme of the song is that life has a way of teaching you lessons through irony by foiling your plans when you exert too much control. Man plans and God laughs, etc.

The word takes its root from comedic wit, such as puns and comedies of error. For example, in the musical, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" there is a character who has searched for his missing children for decades. A captain of the army comes to his town to wed a virgin concubine, only to find out that she is actually his sister and they are children of the old man. Furthermore, they were only reunited with their father because another character, seeking to disrupt their marriage for the benefit of his master, pretended to be a fortune teller that would help the old man find his kids and then actually did, inadvertently, through his devious acts. That's ironic. While also unexpected and coincidental, the irony stems from the circumstantial nature of the event.

Rain on your wedding day is not ironic. Holding your wedding in April in Arizona with the theme "April Showers", knowing that it very rarely rains in Arizona in April and thus making light of the point, and then having it rain in the middle of your ceremony...that would be ironic.

From Wikipedia's article on the word, the best description I found was "a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things". It is the comedic relief that comes from recognizing the curveballs you are thrown just when you have it all figured out. Often, it's the situations that help the underdog.

Generally speaking, because they are circumstantial, most ironies must be deliberate or else unique to that situation. A "No Smoking" sign on top of a poster of a smoking Sherlock Holmes (seen in the Wikipedia article) is not in of itself ironic. However, someone deliberately placing a no smoking sign atop that poster would be. This photo is ironic because it is unique to the situation: http://bit.ly/6SqBsD

While we're on the conversation, can we please stop using the word "literally" to mean something happened, as in "I literally ate the whole sandwich." That implies that you did not do something figuratively, but there is no figure of speech having to do with eating a sandwich. It is an explanatory word, not an emphasis. "He literally went around the world in 80 days" is an accurate way to describe your friend's 80 day trip across 4 continents. "Did you hear? NASA is building a spaceship that can literally travel faster than the speed of light." Accurate. "I literally worked for 12 hours straight on this"...please revise and resubmit!

"Literally" is a lost battle. Literally.

Literally has a second definition that means "figurative or metaphorical" which has been in use since the 18th century. Language isn't static, just as the definition of really has expanded from "in reality" to "truly" and "very." Then terrific went from meaning "terrifying" to "very good."

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the...

"As is often the case, though, such "abuses" have a long and esteemed history in English. Tom Sawyer wasn't turning somersaults on piles of money when Twain described him as "literally rolling in wealth," nor was Jay Gatsby shining when Fitzgerald wrote that "he literally glowed," nor were Bach and Beethoven squeezed into a fedora when Joyce wrote in Ulysses that a Mozart piece was "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat." Such examples are easily come by, even in the works of the authors we are often told to emulate."

There was an actual battle?

Yes, at the field of Litterality? Weren't you there? At least figuratively.

This article didn't really clear up the definition for me.

What are the factors that determine the expected result?

Is it ironic that complaining about Facebook on Facebook is not ironic?

It is, but only if you're Mark Zuckerberg. And even then, it would be so if you meant it as a private message to the Facebook executives and it ended up being public due to privacy settings changes which you designed.

Edit: Actually, I misread your last sentence. It still isn't ironic, unless you were trying to teach someone what irony was and that was your example of irony.

My reasoning is this:

- It would be ironic to complain about a less famously terrible social network on said social network

- It wouldn't be ironic with Facebook because it's popular opinion that Facebook is terrible and that its users are prone to complaining on Facebook

- It would be ironic that it's not ironic to complain on Facebook about Facebook on Facebook because complaining about X social network on X social network would be ironic

> Is it ironic that complaining about Facebook on Facebook is not ironic?

Only if you had just come into this knowledge for the first time, and only up until now having believed that complaining about Facebook on Facebook is the epitome of irony.

It is always an interesting AI problem to solve.

Could you come up with an algorithm for a computer to detect irony? It seems like an interesting and hard problem.

There is statistical sentiment analysis and that seems relatively easy. But one would need to understand the presented situation and see if it is plausible or realistic, then maybe if it diverges from reality beyond some kind of a measurable threshold then it is understood to be irony.

Is AdBlock buying ads to advertise AdBlock ironic [1] ?

[1] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/08/24/web-ad-killer-adblo...

Yes.

Here are writings from some other sources about the meaning of irony. Though some of them disagree with each other.

“If I were in charge of the networks” – comedian George Carlin’s opinion: http://www.sense.net/~blaine/funstuff/carlin.html

TVTropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Irony. It lists seven types of irony: socratic, verbal, dramatic, tragic, situational, cosmic, and historical.

Everything2: “ironic” http://everything2.com/title/ironic and “irony” http://everything2.com/title/irony

I've always liked a quote from the otherwise forgettable movie "Reality Bites":

Lelaina: Can you define "irony"? Troy Dyer: It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning.

Irony is situational - it doesn't have to do with meaning unless the confusing of that meaning resulted in some coincidental action directly related to that meaning...

For example, the character "Annyong" in Arrested Development is always saying "Annyong" (meaning, "hello") when another character says hello to him. Everyone else thinks he is just repeating his name, but he seems oblivious to this confusion. The irony is that his real name is "Hel-loh", but he does not seem to get the connection either. The misunderstanding of his name and its meaning causes an ironic comedy of errors. Arrested Development is full of these, as are most situational comedies.

"Forgettable" is an ironic slap for the generation this flick defined…

Isn't it actually ironic that a company would offer Thanksgiving lunch on a day when most people would not be in the mood to eat it (having eaten their fill the day before)?

3: a) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result; an event or result marked by such incongruity

Nope, that's just poor planning on behalf of the company.

But let's say the company's boss refused to let his employees have Thanksgiving off because he did not want to be alone on Thanksgiving, so he was going to selfishly make his employees be with him and keep him company. However, all of his employees got caught in traffic --> behind a Thanksgiving parade --> that his company was sponsoring --> (with the theme, "home for the holidays") --> and he ended up alone at the office anyway...that would be ironic. It's situational.

I think it is ironic, according to the definition. Expected result is that when you order lunch, it should be a treat, something out of the ordinary. Actual result, everyone already had the same menu the day before, and probably brought it as leftover s, so it is not special anymore.

Maybe if the person who planned it ever said something to the effect of, "We will never host our Thanksgiving dinner the day after Thanksgiving. That would just be absurd!"

It strikes me as highly ironic that the results of the quoted votes on the irony judging site were mostly wrong.

>What is irony?

The debate that arises from a given definition thereof

Why is this on HN?

Because, "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." quoted from [1].

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. It feels like a very interesting problem to detect irony.

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