What's an example of...?

Question

...'irony' in your life?

Answer 1

Irony, from the Greek ειρων (self-deprecator), is a literary or rhetorical device in which there is a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says, and what is generally understood (either at the time, or in the later context of history). Irony may also arise from a discordance between acts and results, especially if it is striking, and known to a later audience. A certain kind of irony may result from the act of pursuing a desired outcome, resulting in the opposite effect, but again, only if this is known to a third party. In this case the aesthetic arises from the realization that an effort is sharply at odds with an outcome, and that in fact the very effort has been its own undoing.

More generally, irony is understood as an aesthetic valuation by an audience, which relies on a sharp discordance between the real and the ideal, and which is variously applied to texts, speech, events, acts, and even fashion. All the different senses of irony revolve around the perceived notion of an incongruity, or a gap, between an understanding of reality, or expectation of a reality, and what actually happens.

There are different kinds of irony. For example:

Tragic (or dramatic) irony occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate, as in Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King.
Socratic irony takes place when someone (classically a teacher) pretends to be foolish or ignorant, but is not (and the teaching-audience, but not the student-victim, realizes the teacher's ploy).
Cosmic irony is a sharp incongruity between our expectation of an outcome and what actually occurs.