It's a casual joke, an ironic expression of the old fear that if women were given power over men, they'd subjugate them, castrate them, humiliate them.
The result is that Antony's extreme grief at the fake news of her supposed suicide, instead of being a dramatically ironic expression of tragic and ennobling love is so ridiculously bathetic (especially when contrasted with his raw cry of pain on hearing of the death of his friend Enobarbus) that the press-night audience laughed.
The so-called 'freedom' modified to 'madame' might be a kind of ironic expression of the view that the greater social chaos is, the freer married women will be.
People say things that they don't mean literally: they tell jokes and they use ironic expressions.
I don't know whether Zhao's deference to the Communist Party is sincere or ironic, but his expression of hope for the ascendancy of its liberal faction, though peculiarly policy-wonky and pragmatic as an artistic vision, aims at a necessary, if not sufficient, stage of political progress.
She's recently lost the family home, Belle Reve, in another ironic and symbolic expression of squelched dreams and is hoping to save herself through her unflagging determination to ignore reality.
In Greece, crisis-born phrases pepper conversations in cafes and offices and on subway trains, particularly the ironic use of expressions or slogans uttered by political leaders, like a claim in 2009 by George A. Papandreou, then the prime minister, that there was money, when clearly there was not.
Whether you see them as narcissistic silliness, ironic statements or creative expression, selfies reflect the ambiguity around the whole self idea and self conversation.
He describes his artwork to The Creators Project, "My body of work has always imbued a deep sense of tender emotion with characters and themes that seamlessly integrate both haunting expression and ironic truth".
Given the roles of p38 as an inducer of apoptosis and inhibitor of cellular proliferation, it is ironic that elevated p38 expression has been found in many cancer types, including breast, lung, thyroid and HNSCC, and that p38 has been implicated in promoting cell survival [12], [16], [17], [18], [19].
By now, to those like me who have followed Mr. Malkmus's music over the last 10 years, it's a nostalgic expression, a little ironic reference to a time when little ironic references were de rigueur and the half-hearted try was the badge of the so-called slacker generation.
