Archive | July, 2011

Beyond Irony

I’m feeling ambivalent about irony. Certainly I’m grateful to it for providing me imageswith 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.

Jul 2011
Spill it? Clean it up

Spill-it

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.