I’m feeling ambivalent about irony. Certainly I’m grateful to it for providing me 
with some of the best laughs I get these days; mostly from British humorists, who are masters of the form. And ironic prose is often challengingly amusing, offering a showcase for a kind of chilly cleverness.
It must say something about our society that the use of irony has become so all-pervasive. Why do we rely on it so much in writing?… click here to continue reading.
It always struck me as so quintessentially American, that Pottery Barn metaphor that Colin Powell and Thomas Friedman used to refer to Iraq: “You break it, you own it”. (You wonder whether a public speaker elsewhere in the world would have chosen a less explicitly commercial metaphor; such as, say, a mother saying to her child, “If you spill that milk, you’re cleaning it up”.) Buzz-phrases that catch on as solidly as this one did clearly resonate with something deep within the collective imagination.… click here to continue reading.