Beyond Irony
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? And why do we frame so much of what we say with finger quotes?
Jul 2011
Spill it? Clean it up
It always struck me as so quintessentially American, that Pottery Barn metaphor that Colin Powell and Thomas Friedman chose to refer to Iraq: “You break it, you own it”. I wonder whether a public speaker elsewhere in the world would have made this same point by invoking a less explicitly commercial image. Such as, say, a mother saying to her child,