I took the tone of insouciant positiveness as ironic, much as a light mist cloaking a large unseen something, and the residual agenda here to consist in all the bad stuff that may (will?) emerge once the mist clears.
I too saw irony here-in: but, I tend to see (a bit of) iron-y in jus' about everything... especially where in mind what is there & imagined tends to become real ?
needed? a bit more right-brain (yin) "stuff" .... the Intuited.
It's my probably self-negating opinion (said the lying Cretin) that Americans are incapable of understanding irony because they are so engrained in the custom of fake sincerity.
Charley the Big O for Oaf Olson said he couldn't understand irony because he couldn't figure out what the "iron" was doing in it.
I consider that statement, coming from a putatively educated person, to be disingenuous -- a dissimulation, intended but failing to be properly ironic.
That is, speaking of irony proper: c.1500, from Latin ironia, from Greek eironeia "dissimulation, assumed ignorance," from eiron "dissembler," perhaps related to eirein "to speak". Used in Greek of affected ignorance, especially that of Socrates. Figurative use for "condition opposite to what might be expected; contradictory circumstances" is from 1640s.
The other kind of irony, iron-y, adv., meaning having iron in it, in use from the late 14th c., would provide the basis of Olson's joke, if indeed he were actually intending to joke (in which case it would perhaps have been the first time).
Coming as I do from a long and illustrious line of titanic Hellenic ironers whose descendants have of late forgotten their linguistic legacy, I can assure you that an alarming number of these descendants are not feigning ignorance. Case in point: Greece has the highest number of cell/”smart” phones per capita in the EU. (Or at least it did have before the financial crunch.)
Yes, I know what you mean...
ReplyDeleteI love that self-nurturing/sustaining sense of "so much to think about yet".
Vassilis, I love the (characteristic) transmogrification in verses of the ordinary into the extraordinary.
I took the tone of insouciant positiveness as ironic, much as a light mist cloaking a large unseen something, and the residual agenda here to consist in all the bad stuff that may (will?) emerge once the mist clears.
ReplyDelete(Later for that.)
I too saw irony here-in: but, I tend to see (a bit of) iron-y in jus' about everything...
ReplyDeleteespecially where in mind what is there & imagined tends to become real ?
needed? a bit more right-brain (yin) "stuff" .... the Intuited.
“Transmogrify”—always did like that word, Conrad, but it looks as if Tom and Ed saw right through me here.
ReplyDeleteBTW, who was it that said something along the lines of “Poets should avoid irony like the plague?” It wasn’t this guy, was it?
That guy Louis can be found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177245
ReplyDeleteAnd then there was that other guy who said he didn't mind doing the dishes, but stopped short at the ironing.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't that insouciant photography buff who also said "It all comes out in the wash,' was it?
ReplyDeleteIt's my probably self-negating opinion (said the lying Cretin) that Americans are incapable of understanding irony because they are so engrained in the custom of fake sincerity.
ReplyDeleteCharley the Big O for Oaf Olson said he couldn't understand irony because he couldn't figure out what the "iron" was doing in it.
I consider that statement, coming from a putatively educated person, to be disingenuous -- a dissimulation, intended but failing to be properly ironic.
That is, speaking of irony proper: c.1500, from Latin ironia, from Greek eironeia "dissimulation, assumed ignorance," from eiron "dissembler," perhaps related to eirein "to speak". Used in Greek of affected ignorance, especially that of Socrates. Figurative use for "condition opposite to what might be expected; contradictory circumstances" is from 1640s.
The other kind of irony, iron-y, adv., meaning having iron in it, in use from the late 14th c., would provide the basis of Olson's joke, if indeed he were actually intending to joke (in which case it would perhaps have been the first time).
Tom,
ReplyDeleteComing as I do from a long and illustrious line of titanic Hellenic ironers whose descendants have of late forgotten their linguistic legacy, I can assure you that an alarming number of these descendants are not feigning ignorance. Case in point: Greece has the highest number of cell/”smart” phones per capita in the EU. (Or at least it did have before the financial crunch.)