What Is Irony?
Since this is a prescriptivists view, there will be very strict rules for recognizing irony. It is all actually very simple, however; and to save you from having to read a definition over and over again to comprehend the meaning of irony, we will be basing this tutorial on examples of irony, to help ingrain the patterns of recognition in your mind. Do not be discouraged if you have already availed yourself of a lexicon to learn the definition of some of the words in this tutorial. It is only by exercising your flaccid mind that you will be able to grasp the subtle intricacies of irony. Before we move on to the first example, it behooves me to quote Henry Watson Fowler, when he said that “the surface meaning [of irony] and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same.” Though going about learning what a word means is not usually best facilitated by learning its antonyms, it is still a useful exercise to detail what irony is not, by examples. What Irony Is Not: – An escalator
