Tuesday 28 September 2010

Lunch breaks, and what you should do with them.

At my internship. Second day.
This is my lunch, and I'm writing. You'll understand the irony* in just a second (look out for it: it has a 1) before it).
The internship is fun. I spend all day doing two things:

1) Writing.
2) Researching about what I'm going to write about.

One of things I have to research after lunch is the correct usage of the phrase "all year round".
Is it:

a) All year round
b) All-year-round
c) All year-round
d) All-year round

If I can't come back to you by 5 o'clock and tell you, then I'm afraid my life is a failure.

*I may have made this point before. I forget. Ask most people what irony is, and they will struggle to tell you. They usually resort to an annecdote. For example, they'll say "it would be ironic if a man was to write a book on how to avoid bankruptcy, and then go bankrupt the following day" or "it would be ironic for a someone devotes their life to arguing buses are much safer than cars, to then die in a bus crash". Note the Alanis Morrisette song "Ironic" for many other examples.

But that's not irony, my friends. Irony is saying one thing, and meaning something else. Through common usage, however, irony has come to mean this, sort of, incongruity between what we think should happen, and what does happen.

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