Glenwright and Pexman presented five- to six-year-olds and nine- to ten-year-olds with puppet show scenarios that ended with one of the characters making a critical remark. This remark could be literal, aimed at a person or situation, or it could non-literal, again aimed either at a person (i.e. sarcastic) or situation (i.e. ironic). To illustrate: two puppets are playing on a trampoline, one falls on his face. 'Great trampoline tricks,' the other character says, sarcastically. Contrast this with two puppets playing on a saggy trampoline with little bounce. One of them says 'great trampoline', an ironic remark.TYWKIWDBI has an "irony" category which now has 33 entries. It wouldn't surprise me if I've miscategorized an incident or two over the years.
Their finding is that nine- to ten-year-olds can tell the difference, although they can't yet explicitly explain it. Four- to five-year-olds, by contrast, understand that sarcasm and irony are non-literal forms of language, but they can't tell the difference between the two.
Addendum: This might also be helpful:
Few words cause as much confusion or are used incorrectly as often as "ironic." Not that it's hard to understand why - the definition is not simple: "a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning ... the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning."More at the link. I consider this a better set of defining characteristics than the person/thing dichotomy.
"In 1969, Susie moved from Ithaca to California, where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York." Seventy-eight percent of the panel's members agreed that this was an incorrect use of the word.
How "ironic" came to be defined as "coincidence" is anybody's guess, but for our purposes, we like to refer to the following quote from the 1994 film Reality Bites. When Ethan Hawke's character is asked to define "ironic," he says, "It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite of the literal meaning."
I've never been real clear about the distinction myself, but I'm not at all sure the one made in the quoted article is adequate; I think it's too pat.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, what posts would you put in a "Sarcasm" category? The only kind I can think of would be posts quoting sarcasm.
In other words, there are ironic situations, but no such thing as sarcastic situations. So in that regard, at least, the article's distinction is valid.
I'm still confused, but I'm pretty sure your Irony posts, all of which are about situations, are correctly categorized.
It seems to me that both of those remarks are sarcastic. Some definitions of irony on the web include sarcasm as a form of irony. Most definitions of irony say something like "a situation opposite to what one would expect" such as Ben Franklin (an anti-monarchist ideologically) approaching the king of France for help in defeating the British
ReplyDeleteI just ran across a reference to the "Darwin Award," a fictitious award bestowed on those who die by doing something exceedingly stupid, thus removing their ostensibly inadequate genes from the pool.
ReplyDeleteThat's clearly ironic rather than sarcastic, but it's directed at a person.
The study design says that "Great trampoline tricks" is a sarcastic remark because it is aimed at person, and that "Great trampoline" is an ironic remark because it is aimed at a situation.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm saying is that to me they both sound like sarcasm. "Great trampoline" is actually a sarcastic remark aimed at an object.
I've added an addendum to the post that I hope will clarify the meaning of irony a little better.
ReplyDeleteThe definition you quote in the addendum is confusing because it's two different usages. The first is also known as "Socratic irony" and looks to be the original definition, as the term "irony" is derived from a Greek word meaning "dissembler." The second is much broader and appears to be more recent.
ReplyDeleteCrude example of Socratic irony: "I know this email asking for my account number was from my bank because it was from the email address [mybank].com." "And it's not possible to fake an email address, right?" The question fits the second definition, but it's a special case thereof.
Wikipedia has an extensive page on irony. If nothing else, it shows there's a lot of disagreement about what it means and how it relates to sarcasm.
It seems to me your Susie example could be seen as a form of what's called dramatic irony, in that if Susie and her future husband had only known about each other before they moved to California, they wouldn't have had to move to end up getting married. It's vaguely similar to the dramatic irony in the film "You've Got Mail." It's not just a meaningless coincidence, in other words.
Irony is the fact that nothing in the song "isn't it ironic?" is in fact ironic.
ReplyDelete