Irony will be the death of us all

The irony debate over at Wordplayer has gotten a bit out of hand.

Here's the scenario, which I first referenced a few days ago. Terry Rossio posted an inspiring article about how to play with expectations of both audience and character within a script.

Great article. Nobody here is arguing anything else.

However, Terry make the mistake of calling these references "dramatic irony."

"Dramatic irony" is when the audience knows something a character does not know. That's the definition, the universally accepted definition. I even looked it up in several places just to make absolutely sure I didn't have it wrong all these years, and the general literary world seems to agree with me.

The real mistake I made was in trying to describe irony. Just basic irony, when expectations conflict with reality.

Stupid Emily.

The problem is, irony is such a complex concept and I was trying to boil it down to its simplest roots, without realizing that everybody who's ever taken an English class has their own interpretation of what irony is and will stick to that interpretation even in the midst of battling a pack of wild dingos.

The audacity of me, disagreeing with people. I mean, really.

The real IRONY here - suckers! - is that the very people who were accusing me of forcing them to accept some societal definition advocated by cookie-cutter English teachers (and isn't that kind of what a definition is?), were also the very people who were demanding that I be burned at the stake for disagreeing with the majority.

But whatever. I gave up on that discussion. Irony is just too complex and I didn't take that into account when I tried to explain it. And some people who haven't been calling for my execution made some very good points that I've been turning over in my head for the past couple of days.

Still, Terry hasn't changed the references in his post to correct his mistake. So I thought I'd go back to the beginning and help to clarify the original problem, one that is much easier to solve.

"Dramatic Irony". It's not the same thing as "irony in drama". Terry's problem in this article is that he refers to every example as dramatic irony when in fact most of them are intended to represent simple irony.

I really hate the person who named these devices.

What's really driving me insane is that even that is causing a ruckus. Even though dramatic irony has one meaning, a meaning I've been teaching for ages, a meaning you can find in almost all literature books across the land, people are still disagreeing with me, and for some reasons so silly I just tried to type up five different sentences trying to explain why and none of them made any sense.

And then the truth came out. Terry doesn't like the definitions of dramatic irony so he came up with a better definition. Well no wonder. If this whole argument is over how to define dramatic irony and Terry makes up his own definition, we're never going to stop arguing because he's never going to acknowledge the real definition and I'm never going to acknowledge his fake one.

I met this guy once who hated Pulp Fiction because he claimed that nobody changed throughout the film - there were no character arcs. So I brought up Marcellus Wallace. Nope, he said, Marcellus didn't change at all. I knew at that point there was no point in continuing the discussion because if this guy wasn't going to agree on what I believe to be a pretty obvious plot point, then we were never going to be on the same level in the discussion.

That's kind of what I feel like now. If I tell you that your feet are on the ground and you keep telling me that you float, we can't really have a logical conversation.

So great. I may have made the writer of Shrek and the Pirates movies my enemy for life. Yeah that's a typical Emily maneuver.