Irony
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Irony is the outcome of an action or event being the exact opposite of what was hoped for, or a disparity (often hilarious) between intended meaning and the actual meaning that comes across.[1] Oxford Dictionary refers to it as "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result."[2]
It's best shouted out loud in an odd voice when you encounter something ironic. i.e., "Oh! the EyE-rOn-EeEeE!!!!" - do not attempt to actually write this on a forum post, use the irony meter instead.
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[edit] Excessive examples
- Irony is the fact that Paul Wolfowitz gave his girlfriend a pay raise during an anti-corruption drive by the World Bank.
- Irony is that the drummer of ZZ Top, Frank Beard, is the only beardless member of the band.
- Irony is that former Penn State coach and convicted sex offender Jerry Sandusky wrote an autobiography in 2001 called Touched[wp] ...and no one thought anything of it.[3]
- Irony is that General David Petraeus'
mistressbiographer Paula Broadwell wrote a book in January 2012 called All In[wp] ...and no one thought anything of it.[4]
- Irony is the fact that Sax Rohmer, who did much to popularize the Yellow Peril with the Fu Manchu series, died from the Asian flu.
- Irony is that a military that costs six times more than its Chinese counterpart couldn't kill one frail, kidney-failing terrorist in a timeframe longer than WWI and WWII combined.[5]
- Irony is the fact that evil gummint-control of everything socialist countries have the highest standards of living and political freedoms available on the planet.[6] They also place highly on The Ease of Doing Business Index,[7] with socialist New Zealand, Denmark and Norway even topping the US.
- Irony is the fact that the Bush administration patriotically took away our rights in the name of defending our rights.
- Irony is not when it rains on your wedding day or finding 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife. Both of those are examples of bad luck.
- Irony is also not the fate of Mr. Play-It-Safe who waited his whole damn life to take that flight only to have it crash, killing everybody on board. That is both bad luck and a bummer. However, if Mr. Play-It-Safe got to the airport, then chickened out and decided to drive to his destination, only to have that flight he'd waited his whole damn life to take crash on top of his car and kill him, that would be ironic. And a bummer.
- Irony could be, however, writing a song called "Ironic" that doesn't actually include anything that's ironic. (Unless of course, God herself is smarter than we give her credit for and that was deliberate on her part.)
- Irony is being freed from a lift,[8] going to church to give thanks to God for your rescue, and getting crushed to death by a stone altar while you pray.[9]
- Irony is a conservative group that calls itself "Americans for Prosperity" cheering when Chicago is eliminated from contention for the 2016 Summer Olympics.[10]
- Irony is another conservative group that rants against raising the US debt limit defending itself when it enters financial trouble and takes out a line of credit.[11]
- Irony is Lynne Cheney, who is:
- Irony is that the protagonist of pro-torture series 24 is played by a socialist from Canuckistan.[12]
- Irony is Sarah Palin bashing the Canadian universal health care system —including her implication that they had "death panels" — only to reveal that as a young child her parents relied almost exclusively on the doctors of Canuckistan.[13]
- Irony is:
- the fact that Washington National Airport — which is rated as having one of the most dangerous approaches in the world[14] — was renamed for Ronald Reagan, the president who busted the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) in 1981;
- Reagan National Airport was where, on 23 March 2011 — just a few months shy of the 30th anniversary of the PATCO mass firing — two passenger jets were forced to land after midnight without ground control because the lone air traffic controller on duty was sound asleep at his post;[15] and
- regulators were shocked — SHOCKED! — that there was only one controller on duty to oversee what may be the world's most high-security air corridor[16] because, after all, isn't that one of the safety regulations that PATCO fought... oh, yeah. Never mind.
- Irony is when the listeners of a well-known, corpulent, Oxycontin-popping blowhard buy into the right-wing meme that Michelle Obama is fat and that her advocacy for better nutrition is bad for your health because...well, because the corpulent, Oxycontin-popping blowhard sez so.
- Speaking of memes, Irony is when you disparage the concept of memetics while using them in the exact same article.
- Irony is when evangelical Protestant Americans oppose gay marriage as a means to defend marriage, yet seem to be oblivious to the fact that English-speaking Protestantism was founded by Henry VIII, who wanted to divorce his by-then-infertile wife and marry a much younger woman, whom he later had killed so he could (eventually) marry four more women.
- Irony is when libertarians love Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (the story of an anti-social architect who goes to extremes to keep from compromising his artistic integrity) while also loving Wal-Mart (the retailing equivalent of a rampaging rogue elephant which forces recording artists and moviemakers to compromise their artistic integrity by "trimming" objectionable words and scenes from their CDs and videos before Wal-Mart will agree to sell them).[17]
- Irony is when the organization devoted to promote the ideology of the above-mentioned author, which promotes itself as working "to introduce young people to Ayn Rand’s novels, to support scholarship and research based on her ideas, and to promote the principles of reason, rational self-interest, individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism to the widest possible audience" is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.[18]
- Irony is when you text "I need to quit texting because I could die in a car accident," then drive your truck off a bridge.[19]
- Irony is when you mock a noted Democratic politician for sexual improprieties (with an adult), then get arrested for doing the same with a minor.[20]
- Irony is when a Mormon family that pushed for Proposition 8 finds out later that their teenaged son is gay.[21]
- Irony is when you think gay marriage is a threat to children and press for an (unrelated) law that would impeach politicians for committing a crime while in office, then crash your boat while under the influence of alcohol, injuring four children.[22]
- Irony is when a motorcycle club goes on a protest ride against the law requiring them to wear helmets only to have one of the riders fall off his bike and die from an injury that would not have killed him if he were wearing a helmet.[23]
- Irony is when a media anti-piracy group produces an anti-piracy PSA with a pirated music soundtrack.[24]
- Irony is when Singapore's national anti-gambling council produces an advertisement about a father betting away his family's life savings on Germany winning the 2014 World Cup, then have the team win the championship in spectacular fashion.[25]
- Irony is when HuffPo posts an article titled "This Is Why You Should Delete Facebook Permanently" the week after it discontinued its own comments boards in favor of comments boards generated by Facebook.
- Irony is the fact that the phrase "loan word" is a calque, while the word "calque" is actually a loan word.
- Irony is the fact that the phrase "it's not rocket science!" is often used to imply that a particular task is not complicated, despite the fact that the science behind rocket propulsion is actually very simple.[26]
- Irony is when white supremacist gangs use a black subculture to express their hatred of black people.[27]
[edit] Improper uses
The phrase, for example, "It is ironic that Jesse Helms died on the 4th of July," mistakes irony for coincidence. For any seemingly random event to occur on a particular day (a 9/11 survivor dying on September 11th in some other year, for example) is simply a case of improbable things happening.
Something like "Isn't it ironic that I should get pulled over for speeding on the one day this month that a speed trap is set up on my street?" somewhat mistakes irony for coincidence, but also mistakes irony for appropriateness. It is not at all ironic that someone would get pulled over for speeding when a patrol car happens to be in the area looking for speeders — in fact, one would question why such a speeder would not get pulled over for speeding in said area. Further, if the police weren't there, they would be unable to pull you over, so this would be less an irony and more a certainty.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Sing it!
- ↑ Irony on Oxford Dictionaries
- ↑ Joe Paterno also had a child-care facility named after him.
- ↑ Jon Stewart regrets it.
- ↑ To be fair, though, during about seven of those years, the military's top commander wasn't that concerned with looking for him
- ↑ Here's a list from the socialist Wikipedia.
- ↑ Economy Rankings, World Bank
- ↑ American visitors, that's an elevator
- ↑ Missing Link ("Link" was the man's last name. Yes, it's a vile pun. But, at least it's not our vile pun.)
- ↑ Conservatives Revel In Obama's Olympic Bid Failure, The Huffington Post
- ↑ The Tea Party raises its own debt ceiling, borrows $1 million
- ↑ Jack Bauer's grandfather is...
- ↑ Palin Crossed Border For Canadian Health Care, The Huffington Post
- ↑ The Most Dangerous Runways of the World
- ↑ Air controller slept as planes landed in Washington, Reuters
- ↑ Lapse at air tower leads to 'outrage', USA Today
- ↑ Yes, Wal-Mart does have that much power.
- ↑ Right here
- ↑ Man texts 'I need to quit texting' then drives off bridge
- ↑ GOP head tweets funny jokes about Filner and Weiner, then gets arrested for sexting with teen
- ↑ Mormon Mom Who Fought for Prop 8, Now Fights for Gay Son, ABC News
- ↑ Lawmaker who thinks gays a threat to children crashes boat into children (He later got charged for another DUI and "illegal crabbing." Yes, illegal crabbing.)
- ↑ Motorcyclist Dies On Ride Protesting Helmet Law In New York, The Huffington Post
- ↑ "The 5 Most Hilarious Ways Anyone Ever Failed at Their Job", Cracked
- ↑ Paul the Octopus lives! ("Filming it in advance was rather an act of gambling in itself, wasn't it?")
- ↑ Expansion of a gas or liquid due to combustion, evaporation or pressurisation creates a downward force, which due to Newton's Third Law of Motion, creates an equal force in the opposite direction, forcing the rocket upwards. The engineering however, is complicated.
- ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinhead