Questions tagged [irony]
for questions about irony and ironic statements.
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What exactly is "verbal irony"
My daughter has been given the task - by me - of explaining irony. She identified and did a jolly good job of explaining 5 of the 6 apparent types of irony: dramatic, cosmic, socratic, situational, ...
user4770
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Is there a word analogous to 'shooting yourself in the foot'?
Specifically I'm wondering if there's a word that describes the phenomenon where some party takes some action to remedy a situation and the result of that action makes the original situation worse.
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Example of Irony
Recently I had a test in college that asks us to give an example of irony.
I wrote this word by word:
An astronaut had over 200 missions into space over two decades. Ironically, two days after he ...
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Is there a proper way of talking about a negative "privilege"?
I'm writing about a video I watched at the moment. I want to ironically describe "having had the privilege of watching it". The video is terrible, hence my writing about it, so I'd like to put ...
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Etymology of "Utopia"; counterintuitive
How did the word "Utopia" (coined by Sir Thomas More) come to mean an ideal place when the Greek etymology specifically means "Not a place."
Relatedly, while this might be the prime use of the word "...
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Is this an example of irony?
It's ironical that Linux, the most secure OS, is commonly used to hack other machines.
Is that sentence correct, with respect to the irony part?
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When did calling someone "Einstein" ironically become common?
In “The Children” (1937) by Howard Fast, a mentally-handicapped youngster is ironically referred to as “Thomas Edison” as Edison probably was, in the USA, the best-known "smart guy".
Today, ...
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Is this the right definition of literal?
I just asked whether dictionaries (specifically the OED) might, for one lemma, state several different definitions which are literal. And there seems to be some confusion about my use of 'literal' ...
user99677