In one Sunday strip, Calvin imagined himself as a rampaging dinosaur terrorizing the elementary-school playground. “The children at the top of the slide are the first to go! How ironic that they had pushed and fought each other to be there!”
Gatsby, maybe you’d share my irritation (I’ve got enough to go around) with the scene in Roxanne, in which Daryl Hannah’s character claims that by refusing Steve Martin’s character’s offer of a robe, she was “being ironic.”
“I was being sarcastic” makes sense. “I was being ironic,” in this example, doesn’t.
Well, she is being ironic in a different sense of the word than this thread has focused on. Sarcasm frequently depends on irony.
I agree it sounds a bit self important, and that “I was being sarcastic” would have been more accurate, but it is correct.
Here’s a better example. Friend from Long Beach came to visit today. He and Mr. Rilch and Friend Who Will Move Next Door on Monday, and I, hung out for a while, then they went out to get provisions for St. Pat’s. After they left, I started changing into looser clothing in preparation for a night of drinking. FWWMNDOM came back two minutes after they’d left, having forgotten something…just in time to see me in a t-shirt and half-slip at the top of the stairs. Said I, “The irony is, I’m wearing the slip so that no one can see through the skirt. I didn’t count on anyone seeing me in just the slip.” Still, he’s seen nude sketches Mr. Rilch has made of me. (No, I won’t scan them.)
How about unwittingly slaying your own father and marrying your own mother, just as was foretold by the oracle?
You’ve done that, MEBuckner? raises eyebrow
Well, not as far as I know…