Definition:
A notable user of irony, especially a writer or performer. See also:
Examples and Observations:
- "In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. . . . One motto on the show [The Colbert Report] is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'"
(Stephen Colbert) - "The ironist tries to relax and float downstream. Her knowingness permits her a good conscience, for she's confident that the spectacle is nothing but weightless contrivances. This trend is hot, that star so over--such judgments come with a bodyguard of air quotes. She surfs with ease and without commitment. . . Her knowingness makes for a certain feeling of superiority, which insulates her, yet she can drop it to have a plain good time. She can take the latest stuff or leave it (or so she tells herself)."
(Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. Macmillan, 2002) - "The ironist is apt to test things by their interest as much as by their nobility, and if he sees the incongruous and the inflated in the lofty, so he sees the significant in the trivial and raises it from its low degree. Many a mighty impostor does he pit down from his seat. The ironist is the great intellectual democrat, in whose presence and before whose law all ideas and attitudes stand equal. . . . Nothing human is alien to the ironist; the whole world is thrown open, naked to the play of his judgment."
(R. S. Bourne, "The Life of Irony." The Atlantic Monthly, March 1913) - "The generic task of the ironist is the one Coleridge recommended to the great and original poet: to create the taste by which he will be judged. But the judge the ironist has in mind is himself. He wants to be able to sum up his life in his own terms."
(Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989)
Pronunciation: I-reh-nist
