1202. This week, we look at the tricky question of what makes something ironic, including situational irony, verbal irony, and "skunked" words, with help from psychologist and author Roger Kreuz. Then, for Bastille Day, we look at how the guillotine got its name (ironically) from a man who actually opposed the death penalty.
1202. This week, we look at the tricky question of what makes something ironic, including situational irony, verbal irony, and "skunked" words, with help from psychologist and author Roger Kreuz. Then, for Bastille Day, we look at how the guillotine got its name (ironically) from a man who actually opposed the death penalty.
The "ironic" segment was by Roger Kreuz, associate dean and professor of psychology at the University of Memphis. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty. This week, we'll look at the tricky question of what makes something ironic. And then, for Bastille Day, we’ll talk about how the guillotine got its name.
This first segment is by Roger Kreuz.
by Roger Kreuz
Have you ever found yourself about to say, “that’s ironic,” only to stop yourself – unsure whether you were using the word correctly?
If you’re like most people, you probably know irony when you see it, but can’t really explain it. Part of the confusion might have to do with the myriad ways the word is deployed.
It can be used in speech. Sometimes it’s used to describe an attitude. Other times it’s used to describe a situation. In many cases, it’s simply used incorrectly.
In short, irony is complicated.
In my book, “Irony and Sarcasm,” I attempt to disentangle knotty issues like these.
In general, irony refers to a clash between expectations and outcomes. Typically, the outcome is the opposite of what someone wanted or hoped for. It’s ironic, for example, when your boss calls you into her office, and you’re expecting a promotion, but you instead find out you’ve been fired.
This clash carries over to verbal irony, in which people say the opposite of what they literally mean. But such expectations are subjective, and verbal ironists don’t always mean the exact opposite of what they say. Insulting someone by saying they’re the most intelligent person on Earth, for example, doesn’t mean they are the least intelligent; it just means they’re not all that bright.
Some cases, however, are relatively straightforward. Consider situational irony, in which two things become odd or humorous when juxtaposed. A photo of a sign in front of a school with a misspelled word – “We are committed to excellense” – went viral. And the January 2020 rescheduling of an annual snowball fight at the University of British Columbia was correctly described as ironic because of the reason for the cancelation: too much snow.
In other cases, however, a situation may lack an essential element that irony seems to require. It’s not ironic when someone’s home is burglarized, but it is if the owner had just installed an elaborate security system and had failed to activate it. It’s not ironic when a magician cancels a show due to “unforeseen circumstances,” but it is when a psychic’s performance is canceled for the same reason.
In 1996, Alanis Morissette was roundly criticized by pedants who argued that the examples of situational irony in her song “Ironic” – “It’s like rain on your wedding day” – were not, in fact, ironic.
Warnings abound in dictionaries and style guides. “The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage,” for example, warns that “not every coincidence, curiosity, oddity and paradox is an irony even loosely.”
One reason that irony is so confusing is that the word also refers to a certain perspective or style: one that is detached, aloof and seemingly world-weary. This affectation is often referred to as the “ironic attitude” and has come to be associated with adolescents or young adults.
Following 9/11, many pundits announced the “death of irony,” arguing that a frivolous and flippant attitude, often described as ironic, was out of step with the times.
If this were true, irony didn’t stay dead for long. In fact, the ironic attitude has been declared dead with almost every change in recent American politics. In 2008, Joan Didion worried that Barack Obama’s election was fueled by a naïve belief in “hope” that would transform the country into an “irony-free zone.” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote in 2019 that Donald Trump’s hypocrisy has – once again – killed irony.
Of course, irony is not the only problematic word in English. Some terms are used so inconsistently, and arouse such strong feelings about proper usage, that people begin to avoid using them out of fear of appearing uneducated. The lexicographer Bryan Garner has referred to such words as “skunked.”
As an example, Garner cites “transpire.” Purists maintain that it refers to things that become known only gradually over time. However, “transpire” is now frequently used to simply indicate that something has happened – the nuance of “over time” has become lost. “Hopefully” is another example. Purists maintain that it should only be used to mean “in a hopeful way” – “He looked hopefully in her direction.” However, it is frequently employed to mean “it is hoped that” – “Hopefully, she’ll look in his direction.”
Many dictionaries contain explicit warnings about using such words in these more common yet less accepted ways. Careful users of language are hesitant to use the newer – and typically broader – uses of terms before they’ve become firmly established. Until then, they’re skunked.
Is irony in danger of becoming skunked? Perhaps.
The life histories of words are difficult to forecast, and terms go in and out of fashion in unexpected ways. Irony is an incredibly useful term that is applied to a very nebulous set of concepts.
Its unique versatility, however, may prove to be its undoing.
That segment was by Roger Kreuz, associate dean and professor of psychology at the University of Memphis. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
by Mignon Fogarty
July 14 is Bastille Day, which commemorates a defining event of the French Revolution, when a mob stormed a state prison called the Bastille in Paris in 1789, freeing seven prisoners and taking weapons and gunpowder. Later in the French Revolution, thousands of people were beheaded including the king, Louis XVI (Louis the 16th), and during an especially violent period called the Reign of Terror, his wife, Marie Antoinette.
The beheadings were done with a guillotine, which was a new piece of machinery in France at the time, and what makes the device interesting for us today is that it is an eponym, carrying the name of a man who was, ironically, opposed the death penalty: Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
He didn’t actually invent the device for lopping off heads — similar devices had been in use in Europe since the Middle Ages — but he did lobby for it to be the execution method of choice during the French Revolution.
Beheadings were not very efficient in the Middle Ages, being done with swords or axes — often rich prisoners would pay the executioner beforehand in the hope of getting a clean blow — and it was often even worse for commoners who could face even slower methods such as hanging, quartering, being broken on the wheel, and being burned alive.
Guillotin thought that if people were going to be executed, everyone should at least be executed the same way, and it should be more humane. Further, he hoped this would make executions more boring, which would reduce the interest of crowds and be a step toward abolishing the death penalty altogether. So in 1789 he proposed to the National Assembly that executions should be done with a machine that would take people's heads off quickly.
The device was briefly named after one of the designers of a prototype, called the "louisette" or the "louison," after Antoine Louis, a French surgeon, but by a few years later, the guillotine was in actual use, and Guillotin's name had been permanently attached to the device because of an unfortunate statement he made that described the device as cutting off people's heads in "the twinkling of an eye" — a phrase that did the equivalent of going viral in 1789.
And here’s a great quotation from Victor Hugo, the author of "Les Misérables" who was born slightly after the French Revolution. He said, “There are unfortunate men. Columbus could not attach his name to his discovery and Guillotin could not detach his from his invention.” (Of course, Guillotin didn’t invent the guillotine; he just lobbied for its adoption. But still.)
And in fact, the Guillotin family was so unhappy about being associated with this mechanism of death, they petitioned the government to change the name of the device. When the government refused, the family changed its name. And I couldn't find a source that included their new name. It seems that they successfully returned to obscurity.
Finally, I have a familect story from Holly:
Hi, Mignon. This is Holly from Nevada, and I'm calling in with a familect story for you. When I was a child, my mother worked in a toy store in the Bally's Hotel Casino in Las Vegas. And one of her young coworkers used to use this expression that I had never heard before. Whenever she found something that she had misplaced or that she had been looking for, she would loudly say, "Hakka bacca bean stalk," to alert everyone nearby that they could stop looking for this item because she had found it. My mom adopted this and brought it home, and it quickly became part of the family lexicon to let everyone know when you found a permission slip that you had misplaced or a rogue sock that you had been looking for from the laundry, you would have to shout, "Hakka bacca bean stalk," to call off the search for everyone else. I don't use this term now as an adult very much, but I do think about it every single time I find something that I've misplaced. Thanks.
Thanks, Holly.
And before we go, a big shout-out to Marlen Ruiz who is the newest member of the Grammar Girl Patreon at the Immortals level. If you're a long-time listener, you know I'qm fascinated by the members of the French Academy who call themselves the Immortals, so I just had to name one of the levels after them! Thanks to Marlen for signing up, and if you want to support the show you can do so at patreon.com/grammargirl.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Maram Elnagheeb; Steven Schapansky; Holly Hutchings; Dan Feierabend; and Nat Hoopes, who used to spell “antidisestablishmentarianism” in elementary school to try to impress his teachers.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
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