Sentence examples for ironic usage from inspiring English sources
The modern, exclusively ironic usage of "first world problems" did not get going until the mid-1990s.
The authors are straightforward on two matters that many students are apparently hardwired at birth to find boggling: whether periods and commas belong inside or outside quotation marks, and whether inverted commas (sometimes called "single quotation marks") are an appropriate way to indicate an "ironic" usage.
Unimaginative onlookers sometimes complain that all this is mere pedantry, and that the fact that 150 years ago the expression "I don't half like him" meant exactly what it says (ie, "on a scale of one to 10, I rate him less than five"), rather than the modern ironic usage of "I really do like him", is of no interest to anyone beyond the offices of the Shorter Oxford.
It's possible that such work influenced the code view of the computerised hallucination in the film The Matrix the following year; but ASCII art – named after the standard alphanumeric set on computer systems – has a much longer history (among its very earliest exponents were computer graphics researchers at Bell Labs in the 1960s), and ironic usages are still around, on Twitter, today.
The word has taken on a life of its own since, and as with many slang terms we adopt into our vocabulary, the line between ironic and sincere usage is never entirely clear, as irony frequently leads to sincerity.
Somewhere in my cortex was the idea to which Orwell himself once gave explicit shape: the idea that "mere" writing of this sort could aspire to become an art, and that the word "journalist" - like the ironic modern English usage of the word "hack" - could lose its association with the trivial and the evanescent.
In this case, its usage is ironic and sympathetic.
It can convey a fervidly sought-after, though nebulous, charisma (which many of the worst affected yearn to somehow buy) … though of course my usage is heavily ironic.
The song's usage of the word "ironic" attracted media attention for an improper application of the term, because according to Jon Pareles of The New York Times, the song gives a distinct "unironic" sense in its implications.
I want to have so much distraction on there I get no work done and Biggs fires me, which would be ironic, as it'd be for too much gadget usage.
