Authors can use irony to make their audience stop and think about what has just been said, or to emphasize a central idea. The audience's role in realizing the difference between what is said and what is normal or expected is essential to the successful use of irony. Create a discrepancy between what is expected and what actually happens, as in these examples. Verbal irony is type of irony that we have not focused on here, but you can learn more about it at the second link, below, under "More about irony.
In the short story "The Gift of the Magi," a young couple is too poor to buy each other Christmas gifts. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Love words? Need even more definitions? Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms The same, but different. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs.
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But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony. Other examples, however, appear to be more straightforward. Henry tells the story of Jim and Della, a young couple seeking the perfect Christmas presents for each other spoiler alert! Both of them sacrifice prized possessions to be able to afford their gifts.
Della has her lustrous tresses shorn so that she can afford a platinum pocket watch fob for Jim. Jim sells his pocket watch to buy ornamental combs for Della. Their actions thus destroy the value of the gifts that they exchange. The story is best described in terms of situational irony, with a dash of dramatic irony as well, since the reader is aware of the poignant outcome before Jim and Della meet to celebrate Christmas.
It is worth asking oneself, before describing such occurrences, whether a juxtaposition is mundane that is, coincidental or more surprising, consequential, or significant — and therefore ironic. Both situational irony and coincidence are used to refer to states of affairs that may be difficult to classify as clearly belonging to one concept or the other. The most we can say is that some people care about the distinction a great deal, and it is worth asking oneself, before describing such occurrences, whether a juxtaposition is mundane that is, coincidental or more surprising, consequential, or significant — and therefore ironic.
As with coincidence, irony is often conflated with the concept of paradox. Once again, the two concepts overlap to a certain degree, since both irony and paradox can involve juxtaposition, sometimes jarring incongruity, and deviation from expectations. Paradox, however, goes a step further and entails self-contradiction as an essential element. Paradox, like irony, has a long tradition in Western thought, but principally in the realm of logic as opposed to rhetoric. In her book on paradox , the philosopher Margaret Cuonzo notes three principal uses of the term.
The crucial issue that separates verbal irony from paradox is that the apparent contradiction can, in fact, be resolved. However, as we saw in the previous chapter, conversational participants implicitly assume that a cooperative principle is always in effect.
This seemingly absurd remark, therefore, must make sense in some way. The contradiction leads the listener to make a context-specific inference — an implicature — that can resolve the apparent inconsistency. Someone who hears such a remark can draw on cultural expectations regarding the weather and conclude that the speaker intends some related proposition, such as its exact opposite.
So what appears to be a contradiction can be bridged with a little world knowledge. As with coincidence, the shared family resemblance between paradox and irony is low. Once again, we see the common element of incongruity, but little else. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time. The phrase is not common: It appears only twice in a billion-word sample of 22 million web pages provided in a searchable corpus known as iWeb. The paradoxical irony began with Socrates being the wisest man in Athens because he alone knew he could know nothing.
And neither example suggests the element of self-contradiction that paradoxes typically involve. Satire may feel like a relatively new and subversive form of humor, but in reality it has existed for millennia. The goal of satire — social criticism by shaming the powerful, the foolish, or the corrupt — can make even ancient examples of the form seem startlingly contemporary. To appreciate a particular work as satiric, an audience must keep in mind two distinct mental representations simultaneously: the literal meaning of a message and an awareness of a discrepancy between that message and the intention of its author.
The satirist has many weapons at her disposal, including parody, a form that I discuss separately. As you look around for irony, take care to avoid the pitfall of confusing irony with coincidence. Often coincidences are ironic, and often they are not.
Think of it this way: a coincidence would be if firemen, on the way home from putting out a fire, suddenly got called back out to fight another one.
Irony would be if their fire truck caught on fire. The latter violates our expectations about fire trucks, whereas the former is just an unfortunate but not necessarily unexpected turn of events. Another way of putting it is this: coincidence is a relationship between facts e. Fire 1 and Fire 2 , whereas irony is a relationship between a fact and an expectation and how they contradict each other. Irony belongs more in creative writing than in formal essays.
It also makes a story feel more lifelike, since having our expectations violated is a universal experience. And, of course, humor is always valuable in creative writing.
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