Tag: Irony

Irony (from the Ancient Greek εἰρωνεία eirōneía, meaning dissimulation or feigned ignorance) is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is an incongruity between the literal and the implied meaning. No written method for indicating irony exists, though an irony punctuation mark has been proposed. In the 1580s, Henry Denham introduced a rhetorical question mark or percontation point which looks like a reversed question mark. This mark was also proposed by the French poet Marcel Bernhardt at the end of the 19th century to indicate irony or sarcasm.
Ironic statements (verbal irony) are statements that imply a meaning in opposition to their literal meaning. A situation is often said to be ironic (situational irony) if there is an “incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result.” The discordance of verbal irony may be deliberately created as a means of communication (as in art or rhetoric). Descriptions or…