Who invented irony

But despite significant buzz across Dutch literary circles — including some criticism that, when placed in a row of several, it bore an unfortunate resemblance to the Nazi swastika — the mark quickly fizzled. This raises the necessary question of what it is, exactly, that makes representing irony typographically so catastrophic. Perhaps ironically, a separate crusade for a textual signifier of irony comes precisely in the form of a script — a reverse-italics typeface called Ironics, attributed to the iconoclastic journalist H.

Mencken, who believed Americans were unable to recognize irony and thus needed a special typeface to indicate that the writer was being facetious. But Houston is careful to point out that attribution is murky and Mencken is credited with the invention of ironics more by virtue of popular myth than of historical record.

In fact, Houston cites a article which identifies British journalist and politician Tom Driberg as the likely originator of ironics:. In this type-face jokes would be set, and no-one would have any excuse for failing to see them. The subtle shadings of verbal irony were bleached flat in the blinding glare of the new medium: what the Internet really wanted to communicate was not irony, but its laser-guided offspring, sarcasm.

As UNICODE — the definitive character library defining more than , symbols from multiple ancient and modern scripts, including Latin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, cuneiform, and more — emerged as the linguistic overlord of web characters, the quest for an irony symbol now had to abide by its rules.

Temherte Slaq will come at the end of a sentence vs at the beginning in Spanish use and is used to indicate an unreal phrase, often sarcastical in editorial cartoons. Shady Characters goes on to examine the origins, evolution, and anthropology of such typographic darlings as the hashtag, the ampersand, and the colophon. The Marginalian participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.

Send us feedback. See more words from the same year. After a widely read essay offered ways to "live without irony" Accessed 11 Nov. Nglish: Translation of irony for Spanish Speakers. Britannica English: Translation of irony for Arabic Speakers.

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Essential Meaning of irony. She described her vacation with heavy irony as "an educational experience. See More Examples That's just one of life's little ironies. The irony of the situation was apparent to everyone.

He has a strong sense of irony. It was both an adjective and a noun in Old English, but in form it is an adjective. The alternative isen survived into early Middle English as izen. In southern England the Middle English word tended to be ire , yre , with loss of -n , perhaps regarded as an inflection; in the north and Scotland, however, the word tended to be contracted to irn , yrn , still detectable in dialect. Chemical symbol Fe is from the Latin word for the metal, ferrum see ferro-.

Meaning "metal device used to press or smooth clothes" is from s. Meaning "golf club with an iron head, To have too many irons in the fire "to be doing too much at once" is from s.

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The linguistics of laughter. A corpus-assisted study of laughter-talk. Oxon: Routledge. Irony and the reversal of evaluation. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, — Pelsmaekers, K. Subtitling irony: Blackadder in Dutch. The Translator, 8, — Popa, M. Figuring the code: Pragmatic routes to the non - literal.

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The bicoherence theory of situational irony. Cognitive Science, 25, — Soames, S. Drawing the line between meaning and implicature—and relating both to assertion. Sperber, D. Irony and the use-mention distinction. New York: Academic. Irony and relevance: A reply to Seto, Hamamoto and Yamanashi. Stern, J. Metaphor in context. Stokke, A. Lying and asserting.

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