Fowler on Irony

 

Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing  shall hear and shall not understand and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware of that more and of the outsiders incomprehension.

1.      Socratic  irony was a profession of ignorance.  What Socrates represented as an ignorance and a weakness in himself was in fact a non-committal attitude towards any dogma, however accepted or imposing, that had not been carried back to and shown to be based on first principles.  The two parties in his audience were, first, the dogmatists moved by pity or contempt to enlighten this ignorance, and secondly, those who knew their Socrates and set themselves to watch the familiar game in which learning should be turned out by simplicity.

2.      The double audience is essential also to what is called dramatic irony i.e. the irony of the Greek drama. That drama had the peculiarity of providing the double audience – one party in the secret and the other not- in a special manner.  The facts of most Greek plays were not a matter of invention, but were part of every Athenian child’s store of legend; all the spectators, that is, were in the secret beforehand of what would happen.  But the characters Pentheus and Oedipus and the rest, were in the dark; one of them might utter words that to him and his companions on the stage were of trifling import, but to those who hearing could understand were pregnant with the coming doom.  The surface meaning for the dramatis personae, and the underlying one for the spectators; the dramatist working his effect by irony. (from Fowler’s Modern English Usage)

 

 

Fowler bags Partridge

What about this:

By the time of his death—he fell from a fifth-floor window in a Prague hospital, apparently trying to feed the birds—Hrabal was one of the world’s most famous Czech writers and the author of nearly fifty books

(Lit Hub intro.:
hrabal

We understand what he’s saying of course but the general flaccidity is not helped by the consideration that there can only be one most famous. Similarly Hrabal could be the best known Czech writer but not ‘one of the best known’. The usage “one of the world’s most famous Czech writers” brings forward the mistaken idea that ‘Czech’ is a genre like ‘science fiction’ or ‘historical fiction’.

By the time of his death the Czech writer Hrabal was very well known outside his own country. He fell from the fifth floor of a Prague hospital attempting to feed birds outside his window. It is not known if his last words were ‘little sisters'.

Then the business of ‘nearly 50 books’. Fifty in itself is not a huge number. If you said forty eight or forty seven that would be fine if in fact the number is known for sure. Perhaps one of the books is incomplete. It’s not that either, but the awesomeness of 50, the wow of fifty which 48 doesn’t have. It would be a puzzle if you wrote ‘nearly forty eight’. Why?

If you know please tell me, don’t keep it to yourself.

Epithets and Slurs

Epithet may have started being used as a genteelism for adjective as in the common locution racial epithets but it very quickly by association came to mean slur or derogatory expression. This is an American usage as there is no mention of it in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. In Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1979 edn.) there it was: a disparaging or abusive word or phrase. This was offered after the primary meaning which would be the classical: a characterizing word or phrase accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a person or thing. No examples were given but I offer chaste Diana and The Iron Lady as typical. A great many Americans would resist the idea that the latter was an epithet for Margaret Thatcher whom they profess to admire. Is Lionhearted an epithet in the secondary American sense? Hardly. Internal strife in the family of meanings of a word is to be deprecated.

Genteelism: By genteelism is here to be understood the substituting, for the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind & our nobility.

(from Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler)