I googled ‘misuse of irony’ and found this from a blog, which I think you’ll agree, is pretty funny.
[quote=“big dog eat child blog”] One time I was hanging out with my friend we’ll call him Bill and everything was going great. We were sniffing glue and punching each other in the stomach, you know guy stuff. Anyway, then Bill looked over at me with a glazed eye and some bovine perspiration on his upper lip area. And he said, “isn’t it ironic that we both have the same color t-shirt on.” So I said, “I believe that could best be described as a coincidence and not irony.” Then I hit him, and I hit him, and hit him and hit him, until he stopped moving and then I threw his body in the river and drove home like nothing ever happened.
Ha ha ha, crimes of passion are funny. Anyway, irony is an important linguistic tool, which can be used as a way to convey criticism, disdain, or just plain be funny. Throughout history many famous people have used irony to amuse us and advance our society; such as Lenny Bruce, Michael Moore, Andy Kaufman and David Foster Wallace. However as Bill demonstrated irony is often misused in our society. We will first examine the causes of the misuse of irony, the effects of this misuse, and how we can make irony be used correctly.
According to the English Language irony means full of iron, it is also a complex way of looking at things or expressing a point. There are many types of irony, such as situational irony, which is the discrepancy between appearance and reality, expectation and outcome, like a health nut getting hit by a granola truck, or Hitler's thousand year reich, because he thought it would last forever.
Then there's verbal irony, which is when someone says the opposite of what they mean, and is generally sarcastic in nature, like when Johnathan Swift suggested in his essay "A Modest Proposal" that English people should eat Irish babies to point out how the English don't value the lives of Irish.
There's also dramatic irony, which is where the joke is on the speaker, like when Dan Quayle said, "I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix." Or when the British turned the tables on Johnny Swift and ate Irish children, boy was his face red.
And there's Socratic irony, which involved feigning ignorance but was much deeper than that. Whatever, good thing he's dead. Despite its many practical applications irony is often misused in our society. For uno it's used way too much. For two-o People don't use irony correctly. And for three-0 it's used in an unhealthy manner.[/quote]
Zoe Williams gives a good inter-LEC-tewl account of all the various uses and abuses of the word ‘irony’ in this Guardian article.
:help:
It’s not a Taiwanese company is it?