http://www.baynews9.com/article/news/ap/march/216058/NM-lawyer-who-targets-drunk-drivers-guilty-of-DWI

*shrug* He'll probably get himself out on a technicality and be back practicing law in no time.

That's not ironic. Ironic would be if we had to work together to kill eachother. Or if instead of bullets, our guns squirted a healing salve that cured all wounds.

It is ironic. Lawyers have the connotation that they must uphold the law if they arbitrate it. Who would expect a lawyer getting arrested. Or is that? Hmmmm to the thinking booth.

I'd say it is. Ironic and hypocritical.

I'm back from conferring in the thinking booth, and yes I'm sure it is.

Yerp, it sure is ironic and hypocritical.

Good work, OP, for correctly identifying irony. Also, funny article.

Those are two primary definitions of Irony. The only definition that might describe this, is a secondary definition of Irony, but even then, I'm not 100% sure I'd classify this as irony:

The article tells us that the lawyer broke the law. We expect lawyers to uphold it if they are to arbitrate it. It is irony, but on a meta level. Good to know something can be like 90% irony, or 85%. Hahahaha.

Well, it's secondary. I wasn't saying that it was 85% ironic, I was saying that I was 85% certain myself, that it would be considered 100% irony. I'm a classicist, so my definition of Irony is very specific, and I'm not comfortable leaving that range.

I think its a lower, non-literary sense of irony, that we are using here, which is really just a popularized theft of a literary word, used when something is funny with a twist of words.

The first definition doesn't sound like irony at all. There are plenty of ways to make a play on words with irony just being one of those ways. It doesn't reference the opposite factor involved in irony. I'm curious as to where and when your getting your definition? It's like the first definition is lacking context. What's differing about the surface meaning of the word and underlying meaning being spoken? Is it opposite? What's the relation.

How can there be 2 definitions of irony when there are 5 forms of it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony

Exactly what I was thinking.

Edit
Oooo he even took the sentence from wiki out of context like I suspected. I am very disappoint. :facepalm:

There can be many shades of blue.

I quoted definitions of Irony. How is that out of context?

Edit: Did I not summarize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Definitions

Edit #2: If you read the entire article on Wikipedia, you'll find that the most repeated idea of irony is saying something that is not what one means and the situation where someone either a character, the audience, or the writer, knows something that others do not. I would suggest that that forms the basis for the 'primary definition' of Irony.

It'd be cosmically ironic if he was arrested for being DUI by a police officer he was suing for being DUI a few years ago.

The whole definition conversation is getting into pun territory, and man must be sober with his puns.

lawyers will bend and violate the law as long as they think they can get away with it. so in my mind it only makes sense that he would be a drunk driver.

Lawyers don't uphold the law, they use the ludicrously specific nature of it to get people off charges like murder and DUI.

He probably has the best chance of anyone to get off because he can defend himself.

It may be ironic if he loses.

That's not to say man has to be sober to use puns.

Hahahahah "Primary" definition. That's like saying the primary basis for all of science is numbers. It doesn't make any sense when it's part of a coherent whole of a concept. Ridiculous I can just as well rank any of those definitions of irony as my primary definition using that argument. No way to prove it either unless you did a mass study for the most popular use of irony. So go ahead and rank that as number one if you really need to feel special about it.

Also squeekers your changing the context once again. I said in the context of a lawyer allegedly unbiased and fairly upholding the law it is ironic that he gets arrested. It could also like g-ranger said be ironic if he defends himself and loses.

I think you'll find a whole host of grammarians, linguists, classicists, orators, and editors who disagree with you about the ranking of definitions. If you look a word up in a dictionary, the first definition, dare I say, the primary definition, is placed there for a reason. So, we respectfully disagree about the meaning of irony. This story is comical, regardless.

Is that then stating that all dictionaries have the same "primary" definition? I'm quite positive that if I were to look in two different dictionaries they would have dissimilar definitions as the primary definition. (I don't actually care enough to look myself to be honest just felt like arguing )

I'd say most of them are pretty consistent. There is a lot of grammatical and linguistic and philological work that goes into a dictionary. You'd be surprised.

All comes down to biased human opinion though. So feel free to claim that as number one.

I am not sure if anyone realized this, but my pun post, as well as including a pun of its own, was also quite literal. So you were all super-punned.
Or something.


This is certainly a double entendre, still fitting as a pun, and still descriptive of irony but at the same time incomplete. They are tiered as such so you cannot follow the list down. Someone mentioned a square rectangle relationship in another thread and it sounds fitting here as well.


But I don't mean to influence this thread much longer, so grab a drink and drive on.