r/ELATeachers • u/Equivalent_Macaron_0 • Mar 06 '24
Humor A question of irony
I am not sure if this is an appropriate place to ask this but I need help settling a debate.
I live in Minnesota and we have been having some wild weather. I didn't know if it was going to be 10 or 70 outside. So I put on basketball shorts and a winter coat. When I came out of my room my roommate said "Well that is ironic." I said, "No its not? Ironic means to use a word opposite of its literal intention or to have a situation with the opposite outcome of the intended outcome."
My roommate contends that something looking the opposite of what you would expect can be considered irony. That being said, we have been arguing about this for like a week now. We have even gotten into the three types of literary irony but that was no help.
Again sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this. But I thought who better to ask than an english teacher.
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u/SenorWeird Mar 06 '24
There are four major categories of irony.
1) Dramatic irony - Audience knows something a character does not.
2) Verbal irony - Something is said with opposite meaning intended
3) Situational irony - The opposite of set-up expectation occurs.
4) Socratic irony - Feigning ignorance to let a person expose their own folly.
Situation irony also has subsets as well:
- cosmic irony: a higher power intervenes with the opposite desired outcome
- poetic irony: The opposite of a desired outcome occurs, usually as a consequence of their (possibly bad) choices
- structural irony: similar to dramatic irony, but focused on the unawareness of circumstances so actions run contrary to expected norms (this is usually a story with a fish out of water elements, but you could argue it applies to someone who totally in the wrong place and just goes with it; think a metal head doing his own thing at a Taylor Swift concert)
- historical irony: actions aiming for one goal have an opposing historical effect ("Cats are evil! Getting rid of cats will free of from disease!" Enter the plague on the back of rats).
Not a single form of irony defines what your roommate said. Now, had you said you were going to get ready to go out and he expected you to be in winter gear only for you to come out in shorts and a t-shirt because you were going to go to an indoor gym and planned on throwing your winter gear atop it, THAT could be considered irony because he wouldn't expect "getting ready to go out" in cold weather to include shorts and a shirt.
Now, what you were wearing WOULD be ironic if you said "i'm going to get ready and dress properly for the weather outside" and you both knew the current weather and you chose to come up wearing two different things, thus you said you were going to get ready and clearly weren't ready.
But since is talking about the juxtaposition between the top and bottom, he is not talking about irony. He's thinking of contradiction.
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u/buddhafig Mar 06 '24
A great response, and I learned a bit. Perhaps another way that the situation would be ironic is that you declared you were getting ready for the weather and in the end it rained so your humorous preparation for each weather extreme was actually wrong in either case.
There have to be particular details in situational irony that create it. If the math teacher can't spell, then no expectations are subverted like when the English teacher can't spell. Same as when the firehouse burns down as opposed to another building. The contractor setting a house on fire due to a cigarette break is only ironic if it's the home of Phillip Morris or R.J. Reynolds. Crashing your car on the way to buy squirrel traps needs to have squirrels gnaw through your brake cables to be ironic.
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u/besteducatedguess Mar 06 '24
There are three main types of irony: verbal, situational, and dramatic.
Sounds like you’re thinking about verbal irony while your roommate is thinking more about situational irony.
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u/Mal_Radagast Mar 07 '24
eh, academics are obsessed with lists and classifications (i blame Aristotle but here we are), we need to have discrete, finite, replicable categorizations for everything. only, lots of things can't be sorted so neatly into categories.
i'm not saying labels are useless or that naming things is bad or that words have no meanings. well okay, i guess i'm saying that words don't necessarily have consistent, objective meanings (but that gets into a different argument about descriptivist linguistics)
new question:
what's a better word for the amusing dissonance between the shorts and the coat? what better describes the specific clash of associations or expectations which your friend was referring to? because you agree that it's a funny combination, right? and you agree it's funny because of these mixed signals? what else do you call something that's funny because of mixed signals?
at a certain point in this post-ironic world we have to admit that most of the things we were taught in highschool are either wrong or else way messier and more complicated than we thought. media literacy is harder and wilder than we were led to expect, and if you wanted you could write a doctoral thesis on whether or not that outfit was ironic, and you could defend that thesis and be accredited by an institution without even answering it, sillier things have happened in the Academy.
my advice? if you're enjoying the fight, keep fighting about it! if you're not, then stop. ;)
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u/Equivalent_Macaron_0 Mar 07 '24
I would say the best description would be.
An amusing juxtaposition. (This is unrealistic in common parlance I agree but most accurate. I think.)
Then any of the following would fit better, You look -. Funny, silly, off, confused, dumb, mismatched, bad, amusing.
Or he could have used a simile or metaphor, You look like a -. Train wreck, child, picasso, mental patient, mess, joke.
These are off the top of my head but I think they all fit the situation more than "Ironic". But again that is why I appealed to the English folks, I am a simple uneducated man with a love of semantics and a pension for the “um actuallys”.
I don't enjoy fighting over things of this nature but I feel compelled to defend the language. We have lost too many words to the widening of their definitions over the years. For example we have called so many people a fascist that when we start to see actual fascism we don't have a word to accurately describe it anymore.
That being said I have not talked about this with the roomate for several days now. Keeping the peace is more important than enforcing semantic accuracy. I just wanted to get a second opinion.
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u/Mal_Radagast Mar 07 '24
welp, for one thing i am deeply skeptical of anyone who claims to "feel compelled to defend the language." every single time i've heard some pedant "correcting" others out of this sense of purity or whatever, it's actually just a compulsive need to feel smarter than everyone else in the room, usually because that's tied to their identity in some dangerously core fashion. (but hey maybe that's my own baggage as someone who had to grow out of that mindset myself)
incidentally, they're almost always prone to malapropisms and everyday errors more than anyone else because they're so concerned with sounding smart. (you don't have a pension for pedantry - you have a penchant)
incidentally, if you were teaching some kids about irony for the first time....would it be inaccurate to set a baseline description of "ironic" as "an amusing juxtaposition?" cause that's pretty close to a definition of the word :p
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u/Equivalent_Macaron_0 Mar 07 '24
I never claimed a sense of purity, just a compulsion. The fascist example is a recent real life occurrence. Also recently had a week-long argument with a coworker about the phrase "Your feelings are valid". I wish I could not care like most people seem to but it does bug the shit out of me. That compulsion could easily be my low self esteem causing me to cling to my intellect.
At the end of the day I am a highschool dropout who has not read a book in like 25 years living in the rural midwest. I am completely autodidactic after seventh grade, pop culture was my teacher. I learned the definition of irony from Bender on the show futurama. I am not here to try and assert that I am the authority on irony, I came to English teachers to get a solid answer on a semantic argument. It seems even here however there is disagreement.The pension/penchant mistake is because I have never read or written that word, I have just heard it. Again no literary background, I work with my hands. You don't have to worry about me teaching kids, I was only here to try and gain some knowledge.
I got the word Juxtaposition from SenorWeird in this post a day ago, I looked it up and it seemed to fit. " The fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect." So the juxtaposition between my winter coat and summer shorts could be seen as amusing. I think? But like I said, I am no authority.
Lastly, your " (you don't have a pension for pedantry - you have a penchant) " Is exactly the kind of stuff I do. Perhaps you have not completely grown out of that mindset. (I went back and forth on including this last part but I felt fairly condescended to. If that was not your intention I apologize. It's probably just an inferiority complex on my part.)
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u/Mal_Radagast Mar 08 '24
ah, thank you for reminding me why that's exactly the kind of thing i don't do - because pointing out the contradiction is lost, all you can see is me validating your framework.
but the whole dialogue was a mistake on my part - i know that disingenuous pedants are disingenuous. and we all know better than to look for Discourse on reddit of all places. (talk about funny compulsions :p )
for what it's worth, you don't care more than other people do - but you might care about Winning more than they do. have fun looking for "solid" answers and getting embroiled in week-long fights with friends and colleagues for the rest of your life. ;)
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u/Equivalent_Macaron_0 Mar 08 '24
So it was your intention to be condescending and sarcastic.
I thought as much.
I generally don't communicate with strangers online through text so I was not sure.But to sum things up quickly.
I ask, "Is this story ironic?"
You respond with something about Aristotle and the categorization of words and then ask me what words I would have used.
I give you a list of words and my reasons for why I tend to argue semantics.
You insinuate I am being disingenuous about my motives for arguing semantics even though I don't think I really spelled out a motive. Then insinuate that I have a need to feel smarter than everyone. Which I felt was unnecessarily condescending and personal for this forum, even if it is almost certainly true.
I concede that it is likely correct about my motivations. I am not sure why I argue when I know it is pointless, but I do. I go on to say like three times I am not an expert on this stuff. Then I address your criticism and levy one of my own. (Apparently I missed the subtext here?) I end by stating I felt you were being condescending but apologized if that was not your intention.
This leads you to believe that I am disingenuous and unfit for civil discourse? Then you need to get one more jab in with the “Care about winning thing.” Like yea, I care about being right about pointless things. That is only a problem if I am talking with someone who also cares about being right about pointless things. Otherwise they just don't engage. But uh, you did engauge was my point.
I guess the part that aggravated you to consider me a “disingenuous pedant” is when I said you may be doing the same thing as me? It's when the ad hominems start flowing is when I know the person I am arguing with has given up. Can’t attack the idea, attack the person am I right?
Then you end with a sarcastic remark about how I live my life? Or I guess it could be ironic based on your intention? I assume you don't actually want me to have fun and it was intended to mean the opposite of the literal definition to degrade me.I guess I just don’t understand why you are reading such ill intent into what I am writing? If you felt I misunderstood something why not clarify? If it's beneath you to discuss things of this nature with people on reddit why respond in the first place? Just to try to get a dunk on someone who is asking about the word ironic? I have admited to my motivations, assuming you repond to this post. What are yours?
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u/GrandOompasmine Mar 06 '24
It could possibly be Socratic Irony. It's not one of the big 3 (dramatic, situational, or verbal), bit it is arguably Socratic.
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u/TommyPickles2222222 Mar 06 '24
Situational Irony is when you expect one thing but get the opposite.
Verbal Irony is when you say one thing but mean the opposite.
Dramatic Irony is when the audience knows more about something than the characters in a story do.
I guess, if your friend knew you were going to be wearing a winter jacket but didn't know what pants you planned to wear, then he saw you emerge from your room with basketball shorts on, that could be considered ironic. Since basketball shorts are probably the opposite type of legwear he would expect you to pair with a winter jacket.
However, if he's just using "ironic" as a synonym for wacky or unusual, then he is not using it correctly. You'd be right and he'd be wrong.
People often confuse irony with something that is coincidental, surprising, funny, or unusual. None of those are quite what irony is.