bryan rasmussen skrev: > Well irony originally started out as a very specific concept of the > Ancient Greek drama, this is what we nowadays refer to as Dramatic > Irony but it is the original irony. Irony then became a literary > concept for plot elements similar to Dramatic irony in books, or a > weaker type of the Dramatic irony found in the plays of Shakespeare. > People then noticed that life was at times ironic in the literary > manner.
Yes and in Rome "salary" meant getting a bag of salt. Concepts changes. > Nowadays the use of the word irony has degenerated to by > pretty much synonymous with sarcasm. As a Dane that is a Chronic Ironic, I beg to differ. In Denmark at least there is a lot of difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony is the main form of humor here, and danes takes to it easily. People being sarcastic we don't much like. But I guess that it can be hard to se the difference for someone not used to irony. I believe the reason that irony works here is that we have such a homogenous society. Somewhere like the US where the cultural differences are larger, it is probably a lot harder for irony to be taken as such and not as sarcasm. -- hilsen/regards Max M, Denmark http://www.mxm.dk/ IT's Mad Science -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list