Archive for the ‘Sarcasm and irony’ Category
July 24, 2023
Also today’s food art. From Bill Badecker on Facebook this morning:
[The Orange Menace]’s lawyers have assailed the Georgia case in their efforts to derail it ahead of any indictments. “It is one thing to indict a ham sandwich,” some of his lawyers said in a recent court filing. “To indict the mustard-stained napkin that it once sat on is quite another.” – NYT, July 22
With this portrait of Helmet Grabpussy, a.k.a. Mustard Staining Cheesy Ham Sandwich:
Fond as I am of my own mocking names — do not utter the true name of the demon, lest you invoke him — Helmet Grabpussy and The Orange Menace — I admire Mustard Staining Cheesy Ham Sandwich. It is, alas, unwieldy, though I suppose it could be initialized to MSCHS (which has a nice rhythm). Or condensed to MusChee.
Posted in Abbreviation, Art, Initialisms, Insults, Language and food, Language and politics, Language and the law, Sarcasm and irony | Leave a Comment »
June 12, 2023
(Like Mary, Queen of Scots, I am not dead yet — but my right hand barely works because the finger joints are seized up so terribly I can’t straighten the fingers, and painfully swollen, and I am mightily pissed; had to apply ice packs at dusk yesterday, when the air pressure went way low and the pain got intolerable. This is, blessedly, a brief posting with not much typing to do.)
Max Vasilatos on Facebook on 6/10, with a smiling selfie:
(#1) Max’s header: “Breakfast of champions” — Twizzlers (twists of licorice-like candy, in various flavors) as a guilty pleasure, possibly even for breakfast
The Wiktionary entry for breakfast of champions:
(ironic) Beer, junk food, or other foods implied to be unhealthy. ETYMOLOGY Originally an advertising slogan for Wheaties breakfast cereal. Used ironically in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions to refer to a martini.
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Posted in Blends, Language and food, Names, Sarcasm and irony, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
October 2, 2022
… paraphrasing Looney Tunes’s Foghorn Leghorn, describing a discussion of how to trap and then dispatch predatory coyotes in a suburban neighborhood of Cleveland Heights OH — in which Tim Evanson reported putting out a roadrunner (aka road runner), tied to a stake, as a lure (another Looney Tunes allusion) and I suggested as an alternative bait “the superfluous infants of the poor” (alluding to a Jonathan Swift pamphlet of 1729).
Tim and I both spoke satirically; we both wanted our satirical intent to be recognized; and we were both reluctant just to flag our suggestions with a smiley 😀 that shouts out “It’s a satire, son!” But readers often fail to discern satirical intent (especially if they don’t know what sort of person the writer is), so Tim and I jacked things up with those preposterous allusions, both of which wear their own satirical intent on their sleeves. (No actual greater road runners, Geococcyx californianus, or desperately impoverished infants are implicated in our proposals.)
(I will confess that it took me half an hour to get the two sentences of my proposal just so.)
It all began on Oakridge Dr. in Cleveland Heights yesterday, with Tim posting this photo to FB:
(#1) — TE: Very big male coyote on Oakridge Dr. this morning. A couple doors down from my house. [photo from a neighbor walking her dog; note that TE has a relatively small dog of his own, so that neighborhood coyotes are unwelcome news]
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Posted in Language and animals, Sarcasm and irony | Leave a Comment »
February 21, 2022
It starts with my 2/19/22 posting “A regular genius”, on quintessential regular (NOAD example: this place is a regular fisherman’s paradise), vs. run-of-the-mill regular (NOAD example: it’s richer than regular pasta).
Which elicited this Facebook comment from Joel Levin:
I get a sarcastic note from he’s a regular genius, in that one might so describe a person who had done something particularly doltish. I thought I might see a mention of that sense in the column.
And then AZ > JL:
In some contexts I get that note too, but I think that’s just an example of the generalization that any compliment can be used sarcastically, not a fact specifically about regular.
And then a comment from Ben Yagoda, making the Jewish connection: it’s probably relevant that JL’s Jewish and I’m, so to speak, Jewish-adjacent; we’re more inclined than a random person to detect a sarcastic or ironic tone in he’s a regular genius. The tone is available for anyone to pick up, but some of us are predisposed to detect it (and to convey it in our own speech).
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Posted in Language and religion, Lexical semantics, Pragmatics, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »
December 22, 2020
The grilling of the One Big Happy kids on their social / cultural knowledge as evidenced in their language use continues in the 11/30 strip (previous episode: my 12/20/20 posting “What question are you asking?”):
(#1) Note the context. One person could ask another whether they used sarcasm, just as chat or small talk, but that’s not what’s going on in the strip. This is some kind of test — note the dad’s laptop — and Joe is perfectly aware of that, though he has no idea what’s being tested.
Then there’s something of a trap in the question “Do you use sarcasm?” It’s perfectly possible to know how to use sarcasm without knowing that the contemptuous verbal practice you’re engaging in is in fact called sarcasm: you know how, but you don’t know what it’s called. As turns out to be the case for Joe: he can wield sarcasm just fine — he uses a sarcasm-devoted linguistic form in Like I know what X is, conveying that you don’t know what X is and expressing contempt for someone who expects that you should.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Pragmatics, Sarcasm and irony | 3 Comments »
September 25, 2019
A Mick Stevens Caveman cartoon in the 9/30/19 New Yorker (about to arrive in the mail), memorializing a signal moment in the cartoon Stone Age:
(#1) The weaponization of sarcasm in prehistoric times
The later history of weaponized sarcasm is vast, but certainly reaches one of its high points in 1970 in the career of British gangster Doug Piranha. During a period of perhaps 70 years sarcasm has spread to become, in the view of some cultural critics, absolutely pervasive in modern society, at least in the Anglophone world.
Meanwhile, the idea that elements of culture can be weaponized — used like bludgeons not just against individuals, but also to aggressively serve social or political purposes — has recently become fashionable.
(And then, of course, there’s the question of the semantic work that the derivational suffix –ize does in converting various groups of lexical items to verbs (as in N weapon > V weaponize).)
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Posted in Comic conventions, Conversion, Derivation, Language and politics, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Sarcasm and irony | Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2019
(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of closeness between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article: no substantive relationship between the two (the Nock, Nock case), tangential relationship (the Sunset brouhaha case), and tight relationship (the defecate in the woods case).
The three cases also illustrate three degrees of paronomasia: the Nock, Nock case involves a (phonologically) perfect pun; the Sunset brouhaha case an imperfect pun; and the defecate in the woods case no pun at all, but whole-word substitutions.
I’ll start in the middle, with Sunset brouhaha. But first, some background. Which will incorporate flaming saganaki; be prepared.
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Posted in Acronyms, Allusion, Ambiguity, Idioms, Implicature, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Language play, Metaphor, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Names, Pragmatics, Puns, Quotation, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics, Speech acts | 3 Comments »
June 26, 2018
A typical report on recent approaches to those seeking entrance to the U.S. at the Mexican border, “Here Are the Facts About [REDACTED]’s Family Separation Policy” by Maya Thodan in Time magazine on the 20th:
Administration officials have often characterized these policies [of interviews and hearings] as “loopholes” that are exploited by those seeking to enter the U.S. Some administration officials have suggested that the “zero tolerance” policy could serve as a deterrent for other migrants who are seeking to come to the U.S.
The idea is that applicants should all be rejected, and in a way so savage that others would be deterred from applying. The aim of the policy is, in Voltaire’s pointed phrasing, pour encourager les autres.
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Posted in Idioms, Quotations, Sarcasm and irony | Leave a Comment »
May 20, 2018
The Bizarro/Wayno from the 18th, another exercise in understanding cartoons:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Three things to recognize: the figure of Medusa, the figure of the (Indian) snake handler, and the politeness formula charmed. And then, of course, you need to know that such snake handlers are conventionally known as snake charmers in English and that the politeness formula is part of the social ritual of introduction, where it serves as an alternative to Pleased / Pleasure / Nice to meet you, formal How do you do?, and the like.
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Posted in Conversational formulas, Linguistics in the comics, Politeness, Pragmatics, Sarcasm and irony, Social interactions, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
