Thursday, March 12, 2009

Pondering

If you put the term "ironic" inside quotation marks that denote irony, does that make it doubly ironic, or turn it into sincerity?

Or does it punch a hole in the language-grammar continuum that sucks up the entire universe of written communication?

3 comments:

  1. It's a vortex.

    By the way, I thought of you the other evening when Larry King came on and as the overpowering issue-of-the-moment jingle blared from the television speakers the host revealed the evening topic:

    Bernie Madoff and his big bag of bullshit.

    "What will the judge decide?"
    "Will those he ripped off have a say?"

    and then it happened:
    the graphic shot across the screen as the host referred to Mr Madoff as a

    THEIF

    I thought: uh boy, typo galore and Doug's head would have just exploded.

    So, in case you didn't see it, now you know.

    jenji

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  2. Apparently they didn't have money left to put it in quotes.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Doug:

    Does the word irony enclosed with quotation marks have an inherently different meaning than one sans marks?

    I think the government should give you millions of dollars to study this problem and iron out the details. (Another interesting wrinkle in its efforts to jump start the economy.)

    (Yes, I'm flat out funny.)

    Ray

    PS: Is '"ironic"' three times as ironic?

    ReplyDelete

So, what do you think?