XKCD: It's more than a comic

That's one way to weaponise your assets.

According to explainxkcd, the joke is that by being accelerated to relativistic speeds, the gold would have a lot more mass and thus would sell for more.

Ahh. I get it. It's not the most bizarrely idiotic idea ever but it is damn close.

#2008: Irony Definition

Ironically, BHG is using irony in a more or less accurate context in this panel. And there's an endless semantic rabbit hole lurking somewhere nearby, waiting to swallow the unwary.

edited 18th Jun '18 11:10:36 AM by Fighteer

I suppose, if the normal expectation is that knowing the correct definition of irony would make one happy, but I'm a bit neutral on that.

The joke is that Cueball is spending all this effort to communicate the correct definition of irony, something that one would expect to provide some degree of emotional fulfillment, yet it's made him far grumpier and less fulfilled than those who use the colloquial definition without thought.

This contradiction wherein a passionate pursuit provides less satisfaction than passive acceptance of the status quo is indeed ironic.

edited 18th Jun '18 1:43:02 PM by Fighteer

At this point I just assume I don't know the definition of irony and leave it at that.

The Alt Text fills me with rage...

I've come down with a case of Irony before,the doctor said my irony levels were too high

You need less irony intake in your diet.

I'm something of a low-level expert of irony, in that my thesis included a chapter on it, and irony was one of the central concepts of my method. (It had to be - I was writing about satire.)

One slightly ironic aspect of irony is that because it has been talked about so much, definitions for it have become confusing - so the study of irony has made it less well understood by the general public.

The most important thing to remember about irony is that there are several definitions that are used depending on context, even if we succumb to our prescriptivist tendencies and prefer not to use "ironic" in the sense that the famous pop song uses. ("Rain on a wedding day" is not ironic by any academic definition of the word - it's just unfortunate, which is not at all the same thing as ironic.)

Irony is the tension between that which is said and that which is meant. For instance, if my girlfriend sees that I'm suffering from the heat (when it's about 25 degrees out) and jokingly asks me if I'd like a blanket, she's speaking ironically. She acknowledges the heat and comments on it by suggesting its opposite, which I might understand as a joke when I realise that what she said makes no sense at face value, and contradicts what would be expected.

Tragic irony is a narrative device in which the audience is aware of a story element of which a character in the story does not know, so the character says, does, or plans something that will bring about a negative outcome; and the audience's awareness of the extra information creates an emotional impact to that speech, action, or plan. Stories that involve prophesies like to play with this device. Usually, even if a character is aware of the prophesy, they will seek to act against it, but in a way that (due to some circumstance unforeseen by that character) will end up fulfilling the prophesy instead.

Incidentally, what the character in the comic says is not an example of irony in itself, but because he is incorrectly using it as an example of irony, the scene becomes ironic - which, of course, was the joke of this comic.

EDIT: And this is why it can be a bad idea to talk seriously about a joke. It's often been compared to dissecting a living animal: you might learn about how the thing works, but in the process you've broken it.

edited 19th Jun '18 4:39:20 PM by BestOf

For instance, if my girlfriend sees that I'm suffering from the heat (when it's about 25 degrees out) and jokingly asks me if I'd like a blanket, she's speaking ironically.

....Right, you're Scandinavian.

Someone is probably going to mention it if I don't, so: Finland is not part of Scandinavia. Apparently, Scandinavia is only Norway, Sweden, and Denmark (so not Iceland, either). Instead, we're one of the Nordic countries - a term that is often used interchangeably with "Scandinavia", to the extent that I wonder if there's any point even having a distrinction. Personally, I don't care, but maybe Scandinavian people don't want people to refer to Finns with their word. Who knows.

But yes, I'm Nordic, and I start to suffer if it's above 25 for more than half a day at a time. (Fortunately, it's been raining a lot in the last couple of days, which helps.)

The sort of little joke that I mentioned in my previous post is an example of the sort of irony that is used a lot in everyday conversation in Finnish. For instance, "eipä", which would, in its normal sense, be used to confirm that you agree with a negative statement, is very often used as an affirmative exclamation, similar to "you don't say!" If you ask for a small favour (like "would you bring me a glass of water?") with a wording that allows for a negative response, you're quite likely to get it. (So "No", while fetching the glass of water.) Another case is when someone is describing something and you suggest that a negative circumstance didn't apply, when you can guess from where the story is going that it almost certainly did. For instance, "I had to call my bank to ask whether I need to fill a form for this" followed by "luckily, their service is always quick to reply, so you didn't have to wait for a very long time" when you know that obviously, they had to wait for a very long time on the phone.

I quite like that we do this - it's sort of quaint, for want of a better word, like the British penchant for understatement. (We also do it, but not as much as they do.)

edited 19th Jun '18 5:51:17 PM by BestOf

I once read (maybe I don't remember exactly right though) that Scandinavia can either mean what you said: Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Or it can mean the Scandinavian Peninsula, in which case it's Sweden, Norway and Finland, but does not include Denmark. The Nordic countries also include Iceland above these four. And Estonians like to think themselves as Nordic, but other Nordic people usually do not.

About irony, the definition I learned at high school is something similar that you mention: that you mean the opposite than what you say. What I fail to see is then what's the difference between sarcasm and irony.

edited 19th Jun '18 11:58:16 PM by petersohn

Fennoscandia.

Is it wrong that I do see irony in some contrasts? To take the example of the "rain on a wedding day", I feel it becomes ironic if you add appropriate context such as it not having rained for an entire week prior nor afterwards" (meaning the wedding would have been fine if it happened any other day). Or more so, if the reason the wedding happened on that day was due to a re-scheduling for risk of rain.

If it's rescheduled to a day that is considered somehow certain to not be rainy, yet it rains anyway, maybe you could make a dramatic irony out of that. Just an unfortunate rain on the one day you didn't want it is not ironic, though - it's merely unfortunate.

An element of contrast, between what is planned or meant and what actually happens, is necessary for irony to exist.

I'll make up a slapstick scenario as an example. Let's say there's a fire engine at the scene of a fire. The firefighters are trying to connect their hose to a fire hydrant. Unfortunately, it is on fire, so they can't use it. Here, there's a tension between the intended use of the fire hydrant and the scenario described, because the thing the fire hydrant is designed for turns out to be its own problem.

If we had the same scenario but rather than being on fire, the fire hydrant has been stolen, that is not ironic because the lack of the fire hydrant is not a result of the thing it was meant to prevent.

edited 20th Jun '18 3:56:53 AM by BestOf

"Weird Al" Yankovic demonstrates that exact difference in his song "Word Crimes". On the one hand is a picture of rain at a wedding, and on the other is a picture of a fire truck that is on fire.

I've seen that music video years ago, so maybe it influenced me. On the other hand, the "rain on a wedding day" example comes from a very popular song, and a firetruck/fire hydrant on fire is just an obvious and clear exmple.

To return to the Nordic thing, one reason I can see for having the term "Scandinavia" that excludes us is that the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian) are mostly mutually intelligible, whereas Finnish is not even a very distant relative to them. (The other Nordic languages are Germanic languages, which makes them part of the Indo-European language family, whereas Finnish, part of the Finno-Ugric group, belongs to the Uralic language family. That means Hindi, Breton, Farsi, Greek, and Portuguese are all more closely related to Swedish than Swedish is to Finnish. Icelandic is closely related to Danish, but I don't think they're mutually intelligible anymore.

Culturally, Finns are probably an outlier among the Nordic countries, but I would assume if you asked other Nordic people whether they consider our cultures related they'd say yes, because we have so much shared history and everything that comes with it. The language and the fact that the others were nation-states with conflicts and royal marriages and everything else that comes with it for centuries before Finland was ever considered a nation still creates a gap between them and us. I'd say a Norwegian probably would still consider us as closer cultural "relatives" to them than France or Germany.

Before the EU, the Nordic countries had various treaties that cover many of the same things that are now organised under the EU's umbrella, so those connections also brought us closer. Not all of our diplomatic connections are overlapping, though. Finland is the only Nordic country that has the Euro as its currency - the others have their own Crowns (Iceland has Króna, Denmark and Norway each have their own Krone, and Sweden has the Krona). Finland and Sweden are not NATO members, while Norway, Denmark, and Iceland are. Norway is not a member of the EU, while the other nordic countries are.

Estonians speak a Finno-Ugric language and are in many ways close cultural relatives of Finns, so I can understand why they would like to consider themselves Nordic. They also have something like a Nordic welfare state. I think most Nordic people wouldn't include them, though, because there's a bit of water between us and Estonia is already a Baltic country, so they already have a group (as if you can't be in more than one).

For that matter, since you seem to be adept at this topic, I ask you what do you Finns think about Hungarian: is it a Finno-Ugric language, or not? Because in Hungary there are great debates about this, and unfortunately it's more a political debate of defining (or denying) one's identity than a scientific one to find out the truth.

Linguistics is a science, so I don't think we need to be too bothered about anyone's opinions.

The closest relatives of Hungarian are a couple of languages spoken in the Urals region, and those languages are also related to Finnish and Estonian.

We also have some small relative languages between the Urals and Finland, while the Ugric branch seems to be entirely split between the Urals and Hungary, with no extant languages in the area between those regions.

So yeah, Finnish and Hungarian are related. Not very closely, but we're closer to each other (and Estonian) than we are to any Indo-European languages.

Personally, I feel that there is a connection between Finland and Hungary in that we've both been the junior partner and neglected minority in a larger empire, or a pawn and battlefield in struggles between greater powers.

Also, one of my childhood friends has a Hungarian mother (and Finnish father) and he travels to Hungary at least once a year, so I hear about Hungary and the Hungarian language through him. He's biased, obviously, but he seems to think Hungarians and Finns are connected.

I agree that linguistics should be a science where you need to try to find the truth, and admit that you were wrong if enough evidence points towards it. However, unfortunately, there are many cases where people use science to show that they are right instead. Especially when it comes to history, which is closely related to linguistics. You say that your half-Hungarian friend is biased, and that's not a problem at all. However, if you are a scientist, you should put away all your bias as much as possible, and that is what many historians/linguists fail to do. Since I myself am no expert in the area, the best I can do is to accept the official theory that Finns and Hungarians are related. But event that I do with skepticism, for the reasons I just mentioned. I'm just sad that people cannot be objective about that.

But back to the original topic: is that ironic? No, probably not.

I had enough courses in linguistics at the university to get a very general feel of the field and a great respect for the experts. Their work is very difficult, but when they present their evidence, it's usually a very large body of research where conclusions are drawn from many different sources and arguments simultaneously.

Hungarian is a Ugric language, which makes it a relative of the Ugric languages at the Urals, which are part of the core Finno-Ugric group that also includes the Finnic branch. Hungarian also has a large body or Turkic influences that probably originate from interaction/integration with Turkic peoples starting from the time the original Finno-Ugric language was spoken in the Urals region before both groups migrated.

Turkic peoples were spread along a very large area for centuries during and after the Roman period, so the ancestors of Hungarians probably mingled with them (while our group, presumably, had already migrated more to the north, presumably roughly around Estonia/Finland). The Hungarian identity didn't really start to rise until about half way through the Byzantine Rome's period.

Incidentally, Turkic peoples also started settling in Anatolia around this time, eventually replacing the culturally Greek (and very diverse) population of the Byzantine Anatolia. Centuries later, the Ottoman empire spread to cover all of Anatolia and parts of Europe, including part of modern Hungary. Thus, another period where Hungarians and Turks were neighbours and mingled among each other lasted for a few centuries more. This sort of thing tends to leave a mark on both languages. however, it does not mean that Hungarian is suddenly a Turkic language, any more than Swedish and German loan words make Finnish a Germanic language. The core grammar and most of the vocabulary, as well as most of the pronunciation, still come from the original Finno-Ugric language.

edited 20th Jun '18 8:04:57 AM by BestOf

I remember familiarizing myself with all this from reading Stand Still, Stay Silent. It's fascinating how you have all these closely related languages, then there's Finnish, just kinda there.

Finnish has nothing on Basque in that department. Its speakers mostly dwell near the Pyrenees (the natural border between France and Spain), and It's not related to any known language.