Jul 012009
Sarcasm has been a mystery to me in the US. Popular wisdom amongst Brits is Americans don’t get it, and popular wisdom amongst Americans is it’s ‘bad’. Yet I seem to find myself surrounded by it here.
Well, I read a great post on sarcasm tonight. Here are some extracts
Yep, think I’d already twigged that one .
So perhaps this confusion is largely about how close we are to the people we’re teasing/insulting? Well I never! Now I have a new way of looking at things to put on and try out for a while.
This might make life on this side of the pond a lot less confusing – Thank you Solo!
This reminds me of a joke someone told me, maybe you know it?
A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. In some languages though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative.
However,” he pointed out, “there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”
Ha! Love it, Chris!
[…] sense. (Very briefly, BrE = the opposite of what you mean, AmE = nasty or unkind – see here and here for more on that […]