Irony as a Motivational tool

Shared by AH.

An example

When I see something I dislike, or some stupidity, I will call something "duck sauce". This saying is ironic.

My sister and I were skiing when we came up with this. There is an existing saying called "lame sauce", which is slightly ironic, because there is still the word "lame" in there, but there is obviously no "sauce" involved. "Lame sauce" is a saying, and "lame duck" is a saying, so I combined them to "duck sauce", a third saying carrying the meaning of the former.

Examples of Irony

Requested by one of my intrepid commenters, I will post a few examples of irony.

A lot of the examples I have are along the lines of sarcasm and metaphor. "I could care less", or "blew me mind". I don't particularly include want to include things like puns or outright lies, although for certain people, those count as well.

It turns out I'm much better at spotting misuses of irony than I am actually creating some. It seems like as soon as I am able to sub-categorize the ironic statement, it no longer seems like a valid example.

"Break a leg"

Irony on Bones

Good discussion of irony on tonights episode of Bones.

Cam: Yeah, it's ironic
Daisy: With all due respect, that's not irony. People may think it is irony, but it's really just an unfortunate juxtaposition of events.
Angela: Well, I guess they're going to need a shorter word for that.

The Winter Olympics in Vancouver have a shortage of snow.

Meanwhile in Dallas, there was a record snowstorm.

I just wanted to point that out. There's nothing at all ironic here.

Brandenburg Wall

U2 concert sparks fury over 'Berlin wall'

Brandenburg Gate is where Ronald Reagan gave his famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech. U2 gave a concert there, and selling out all available tickets. MTV constructed a wall around the area so that non-paying customers couldn't see it for free.

The irony of a "wall" covered in white plastic sheeting almost identical to the colour of the original Berlin wall was lost on exactly no one.

This is a tough case, because how do we describe this situation. The fact of the matter is, this is human nature. When you watch the Daily Show every night, and see how politicians say one thing when they're in power, and the exact verbatim opposite 4 or 8 years later, you wonder at what hypocrites they are. It makes complete sense to have different standards for your side and there side. MTV is a company trying to make money, this is capitalism. The Berlin Wall was supposed to help Communism. So insanely, the people who are complaining about this are actually themselves the ones who are being "ironic".

It's funny that the people who give credit to Reagan for ending the Cold War do to massive (incomprehensible really) military spending are mostly the same who think we need a giant border fence with Mexico. It's not ironic. Is putting a wall up at a place significant for tearing down walls ironic? The issue is that if they called it the "Freedom" or "Openness" concert, then that would be actually irony, since the wall MTV put up stopped the openness. This bleeds over to the whole event being called ironic, which I will live with, as long as people acknowledge the underlying fact that there is an implicit semantic meaning of openness being the venue in question.

Open Thread

You can present generic questions about irony here if you like.