Shriike wrote:I don't think Kae understands what Irony is
No, you don't understand what irony is. Irony is the use of words in a way to conceal true intention with literal intention. More clearly, irony is when you say one thing but mean another. Much subtext, many puns, and quite a bit of sarcasm and slander are dependant on irony. In fact, sarcasm and irony are almost one and the same.
It seems common to believe that the common usage accepts another definition of irony, something which is generally vaguely indicated in the rant above. In fact, a few of the god-awful web dictionaries, run by people which have neither training nor experience in linguistics, have picked the alternate up as if it was common.
Lately, there's this nasty trend for people to suggest that because a mistake is in common use, it is somehow suddenly correct by reflection through common usage in some misguided interpretation of linguistic drift within a live language. Ignorance isn't linguistic drift. Mistakes come and mistakes go; changes to the language take hundreds of years, and this particular buffoonery isn't yet extant even in three seperate generations. Never you worry: people will find out what irony means just as they found out what nuclear meant (many people thought nuclear simply implied a kind of explosive in the 60s and 70s.) Besides, language change is almost always creative, and almost never reformulative. If that doesn't make sense to you, chances are you shouldn't be arguing about the progressive change in languages any more than someone which doesn't know what o(n log n) means should discuss the impact of algorithm selection or than someone which isn't aware that gasoline does not contain octane should be discussing fuel mixtures.
By the way, I can't take credit for the above rant, but he is a linguist, which IS a science, which means he knows what he's talking about.
