Grimmer Girl here, this week Keith Houston, the author of Shady Characters, the secret

life of punctuation, symbols, and other typographic marks, is going to help us understand

a tricky concept, irony.

The word irony is used a lot, hipsters dress ironically.

The Daily Show puts an ironic twist on the day's news.

Sinking on its maiden voyage of the unsinkable Titanic was deeply ironic.

But what exactly is irony?

Most simply, it's the presence of a second contradictory meaning within a situation or expression.

The devil is in the detail, though, and irony is notoriously difficult to communicate.

Today, we'll take a look at how to recognize the different kinds of irony and how to do

irony justice in your writing.

The concept of irony comes from the plays of ancient Greece.

Stock characters could be identified by their costumes or props, so audiences knew how

a particular character was likely to behave, even though the other characters did not.

One such character was the self-depreciating Iran or Befoon, who audiences knew to be

craftier than his boastful opponent, the Alazon.

This is dramatic irony.

The audience knows more about the situation unfolding before them than the characters acting

it out.

Romeo's despairing suicide in response to Juliet's apparent death, which the audience has seen

her fake, is often quoted as an example of dramatic irony.

Socratic irony, named after the philosopher Socrates, also comes from ancient Greece.

...