"ironically" again

Tue Sep 5 22:12:59 UTC 2006

The defect is in the reporter's understanding of the standard meaning of the word "ironically." The fact that it functions as a sentence modifer, precisely like "hopefully" may or may not be relevant.  ("Hopefully" in that position means "it is to be hoped that..."  "Ironically" means "it is ironic that....")

  There was NO suggestion IN THE REPORTER'S STORY of any kind of irony in the fact or manner of Irwin's death. It is true that various kinds of irony may be retrofitted to the report through a combination of ingenuity and a background knowledge of rays which, as far as I can tell, was not in play as the report was given.

  Let me reconstruct more fully what I heard:

  "Famed 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin was killed yesterday after being stung in the chest by the poisonous barb of a stingray off Australia's Great Barrier Reef.  Steve Irwin, who was 44, was famous both for his conservation efforts and for handling dangerous animals like alligators and crocodiles.

  "Ironically, he was filming a documentary on the ocean's most dangerous creatures. The barb of the stingray, which is highly venomous, has been compared in size to that of a bayonet."

  I see no irony here. (Check dictionaries for the various accepted meanings of "irony.") The transition is equivalent to saying what might well have been said in an earlier, less tactful era of reportage, namely

  "Listeners familiar with Mr. Irwin's career may not be astonished to learn that his death occurred while he was filming a documentary on the ocean's most dangerous creatures."

  The reporter did NOT say something like, "Ironically, he was killed by a stingray, one of the ocean's most retiring denizens."

  It would indeed have been "ironic" had the man been eaten while asleep by a salt-water croc that had broken into his house, or if he'd died in some obviously "safe" setting. Such things would be quite unexpected and worthy, perhaps, of evaluation on the irony scale.  But swimming with "the ocean's most dangerous creatures" is by definition dangerous. The verbal context implied that the stingray that killed him was clearly one of those creatures, with its deadly spine like a sawtoothed bayonet of a kind long outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

  But of course the real issue here is how frequently "ironically" has come to be used as a vague, if somewhat emphatic, transition.  Like "in fact."

  The essence of situational irony is the reversal of ordinary expectations. As no one expected Irwin to die Sunday, that death was certainly "surprising" or "shocking."  As described by the reporter IN THAT REPORT, there was nothing "ironic" about it.

  A final point is that "unexpectedly," the only adverb suggested that come close to fitting the context, will not fit the sentence syntactically:

  ?Unexpectedly, he was filming a documentary about the ocean's deadliest creatures.

  He died unexpectedly, but the filming was certainly not an unexpected or ironic activity for Steve Irwin.

  JL

Brenda Lester <alphatwin2002 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:
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Subject: Re: "ironically" again
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Stingrays are docile unless threatened. I learned this from yesterday's reports on Irwin's tragic death.
The irony is that he was killed while working on a documentary about deadly, or potentially deadly, sea creatures, like Box jellyfish.
I'm not sure what you mean by "defective understanding" of the word in question. Do you mean the word "irony," or do you mean the defect is how the statement is constructed?
I am not a linguist, but is this "ironically" construction similar to, "Hopefully it will not rain tomorrow"?

I live to learn.

Jonathan Lighter wrote:
As my original posting stated:

"In describing the shocking death of Steve Irwin on Fox News this morning, an Australian journalist explained that he was killed by the poisonous barb of a stingray. She continued immediately:

" 'Ironically, he was filming a documentary on the ocean's deadliest creatures.' "

No mention of the retiring nature of stingrays. The contextual presumption, if any, was that stingrays are indeed deadly. The sentence immediately preceding was, essentially, "Steve Irwin became famous both for his conversation efforts and for handling dangerous animals like alligators and crocodiles."

Nor was there any emphasis on the word "ocean's," as if to contrast it with "land's."

The point of all this is to help establish what appears to me to be the fact that media people and others are using "ironically" more and more as a transitional, sentence-initial word that carries very little meaning beyond "and" or "in fact." I suspect that the reason for this partly a defective understanding of "irony" and, perhaps more interestingly, a feeling that a follow-up, explanatory sentence with a pronominal subject just "sounds better" with some kind of introductory transition.

"Ironically" fills the bill perfectly because

1. "irony" obviously has a subjective aspect, which helps discourage objections such as mine,

2. any reference to "irony" will likely mark you as an educated observer able to evaluate facts from a detached perspective (vital characteristics for news people),

3. the four or five syllables of a nearly meaningless, transitional "ironically" provide a one- or two-second pause for listeners to absorb the more important information that has just been communicated,

4. the use of an introductory element like "ironically" softens the abruptness of the following one-syllable pronominal subject (cf. the sound of the original sentence without "ironically"), and,

5. as Larry suggested, there seems to be no handy, all-purpose adverb that can accomplish all these wonders with so little thought and nearly without regard to actual relationships between the ideas so linked.

To elaborate on point 3 alittle, this kind of "ironically" seems endemic to radio and TV journalism, but I have scarcely noticed it in print. One print example that I do remember, more or less, came from a Skymall catalogue about ten years ago:

"Joe Blow is an aviation artist who created this print of a DC-3 landing at the Wichita
airport in 1938. Ironically, Joe grew up in Wichita."

"Joe grew up in Wichita," "Joe even grew up in Wichita," "Joe actually grew up in Wichita," "Joe grew up in Wichita himself," all sound pretty simple-minded in contrast to the unutterable irony of growing up there and then painting a picture of the place decades later.

Goak.

JL

Laurence Horn wrote:
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>From: Wilson Gray
>>Ron writes:
>
>>"[I]f one is setting out to make a movie about dangerous creatures,
>>one does not really expect to be killed [by a dangerous creature], so
>>the sense of irony in which things turn out to be the opposite of what
>>one might expect also works here."
>
>>Works for me.
>
>Me, too. My first reading of the irony involved, though, wasn't from
>anything in the text itself, but from the larger context that the reader
>was expected to know: that this was *Steve f-in' Irwin*.
>
>After all, this is a guy who makes his living *not* getting killed by
>dangerous creatures. Therefore, it's ironic that his demise came about
>while he was doing his job, except in this case he did*n't* avoid
>getting killed by one of them.

Except that in this case it apparently wasn't even one of the most
dangerous critters (or at least not under normal circumstances) that
did him in. So the ironies just abound.

LH

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