Some suffer from an iron deficiency; the cure is straightforward. Others from an irony deficiency; I know of no cure. I wrote the other day:
Long-time reader E. C. sends us to rapper Joyner Lucas, I'm Not Racist. It warms my heart this holiday season to see how wonderfully race relations have improved since the '60s in this country.
The second sentence displays irony. The meaning I intend, and succeed in conveying to those not suffering from irony deficiency, is the opposite of what the sentence itself expresses when considered in itself, apart from context, simply as a sentence of English.
Irony thus exploits the fact that speaker's meaning and sentence meaning can come apart. What a speaker or writer of a sentence means by the utterance or inscription of a sentence sometimes differs from what the sentence itself means considered apart from a context of use.
Recent Comments