alexlocascio at juno.com wrote:
> Irony: Steely Dan
>
> Not Irony: Donny and Marie Osmond
>
> Irony: Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal
>
> Not Irony: Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population
And so on.
Alex, I'm afraid your answer was thrown out of court some 2400 years ago. The following from Plato's *Euthyphro*:
Socrates: I would rather here from you a more precise answer, which you have not as yet given, my friend, to the question, What is "piety"? When asked, you only replied, Doing as you do, charging your father with murder.
Euthyphro: And what I said was true, Socrates.
Soc. No doubth, Euthyphro; but you would admit that there are many other pious acts?
Euth. There are.
Soc. Remember that I did not ask you to give me two or three examples of piety, but to explain the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious. Do you not recollect that there was one idea which made the impious impious, and the pious pious?
Euth. I remember.
Soc. Tell me what is the nature of this idea, and then I shall have a standard to which I may look, and by which I may measure actions, whether yours or those of any one else, and then I shall be able to say that such and such an action is pious, such another impious.
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I can't tell whether your examples are examples of irony or of something else until you first tell me what irony is. And in the case of the example I know best, your earlier definition of irony (from the dictionary: OED and AHD both agree with you) is obviously wrong, for whatever "The Modes Proposal" means it does not simply (or even at all) mean the opposite of what it says. It does not, for example, mean that we should let children starve.
Carrol