Irony

“He’s all talk,” we say, when we want to criticize someone who says a lot but never backs it up with action.  “Talk is cheap,” we say, when we want to remind someone that it’s one thing to say you will help, but another thing to do it.  The Italian for chatter is ciarlare, from which they make the word ciarlatano, a chatterer, a man who talks a lot – meaning, a huckster, a cheat, a charlatan.
     The enemies of Socrates, and a couple of his less helpful friends too, thought that he talked too much, and that he seldom meant what he said, because he merely played with words to confuse people, to hold men of high station up to ridicule, and to corrupt the minds of young men who enjoyed seeing him do it.  But I don’t think the charge was fair.  Socrates often feigned ignorance in order to draw people out, so that they could see what they had taken for granted, and so that he and they might come to a sharper view of justice or piety or beauty or love, a sharper and a truer view.  He would have liked what Hamlet said he was doing in searching for the truth about his father’s death and what his uncle had to do with it: “By indirections find directions out.”  In any case, whether they loved Socrates or despised him, people knew that he was a master of IRONY, by which they meant that he was sly, a wordsmith, saying one thing and meaning another.
     I don’t think, though, that that is a sufficient definition of IRONY, because very often we find something IRONIC even though it has nothing to do with words.  We are surprised to see order where we had expected disorder.  When the elderly John Adams lay dying on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he had something to say about an old enemy and an old friend of his, with whom he had been corresponding for many years after they had both retired from public life: “Thomas Jefferson yet lives.”  But Adams didn’t know that Jefferson too was dying, on that very same day.  Neither Jefferson nor Adams was playing at being Socrates, then, but we do find the situation and the words IRONIC, and that is because we stand above the two men, we know more than either one of them knew, and it is that clash in levels of knowledge, the highlighted discrepancy, in this case, between what it was perfectly reasonable for Adams to assume, and what was instead the truth of the matter, that moves us powerfully – moves us with the fitness of an artist’s fine IRONIC stroke.
     The word IRONY comes from Greek EIRONIA, meaning what an EIRON does – an EIRON, that is, a DISSEMBLER, somebody who pretends to be what he isn’t.  EIRON in turn may be related to the Greek verb EIRO, I SPEAK.  If that’s the case, then it comes from an ancient Indo-European root werh-, to speak – Greek lost the initial W in words that otherwise would have it (we have Latin video, I see, but Greek oida, I see).  That old root gave us words all over the place that have to do with talking, and not always telling the truth: Greek rhetor, a public speaker; Russian vrat’, to tell a lie; but also the simple English word WORD. 
     Be men and women of your WORD, my friends!