Irony

Irony is "a juxtaposition of what, on the surface, appears to be the case with what is actually or expected to be the case." The word comes from the Greek eironeia, which named the eiron of Old Comedy, the stock character who feigns less intelligence than he has and so defeats the braggart alazon; in Plato's Socrates it took on the sense of an intended simulation the hearer was meant to recognize, and Latin ironia sat in the classical rhetoricians' toolkit before the word entered English in the sixteenth century. The Romantic era widened it again, with Friedrich Schlegel and the German Romantics treating irony as a metaphysical stance of alternation between affirmation and negation.

The article splits the umbrella into types. Verbal irony is a statement whose real meaning is sharply different from the meaning ostensibly expressed, the gap intended by the speaker. Dramatic irony hands the audience information the characters lack, placing readers at an advantage, and tragic irony is a specific type of it. Situational irony makes an event's actual outcome the exact opposite of what was reasonably expected, while cosmic and romantic irony push the mismatch further, fate or the author itself doing the thwarting. The definition has worn with popularity: the article records the misuse debate, from Fowler's rule that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning must not be the same to the 1996 song "Ironic" being cited as evidence that the word no longer has any specific meaning. The type this glossary leans on hardest is dramatic irony.