Mind your language
VERONICA had spent half an hour sheltering from the rain in the green- house because I was delayed in letting her into the house by First Great West- ern (more like Last Great Western).
`Silly girl,' my husband said. 'The back door was open all the time. Ironic, innit?' He spoke those last two words in what he thinks is an amusing Estuary accent. For he and I and most people who can read and write have noticed that ironic and ironically are grossly mis- used, usually to mean odd and oddly.
The other thing that annoys people about ironically (though they may not realise it) is its use as a 'sentence adverb', as linguists like to call these creatures. Sentence adverbs qualify not merely a verb or adjective, but the whole utterance. A well-known exam- ple is: 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.' Other such adverbs are sadly, thankfully, luckily and (let us not be sidetracked) hopefully.
Now, quite apart from the controversy over sentence adverbs, I have recently had a revisionist conversion about ironi- cally. Of course irony is straightforwardly `a figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used', for exam- ple: 'You are a clever boy!'
But irony means a lot more than that. Socratic irony, for instance, is, at its simplest, the assumption of ignorance to lead on an opponent in argument, in the manner described by Plato. But when I turned to the excellent Diction- ary of Literary Terms by the brilliant J.A. Cuddon (who died two or three years ago), I found that irony underlies, or is held to underlie, half of the most admired achievements of fiction.
Cuddon gives a list of great writers who have employed what he calls situa- tional irony — starting with Aeschylus and stretching via both the Samuel But- lers to Iris Murdoch. By situational irony an author can make a character laugh at another's misfortune when, unknown to him, the same thing is happening to him.
But Cuddon also mentions the concept of romantic irony in which the writer exhibits an awareness that his work will not be taken entirely seriously. He men- tions Tom Jones and (Byron's) Don Juan.
I suspect that the device succeeds less often than intended. Schlegel is appar- ently answerable for its more recent use.
My conclusion is that the sentence adverb i ironically often refers to a dra- matic irony giving point to a situation (And all the time it was Oedipus's mother'). It is often misused, but not quite as much as some pedants think.
Dot Wordsworth
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