After a much longer delay than intended (I have no excuse) the latest episode of The Word Smith makes its internet debut at the usual venue. I hope to get the next page up much quicker than this one, but as this weekend is looking to be somewhat busy it's probably not going to be up next week.
And now a discussion about irony.
One tricky thing about writing a comic about a grammar conscious super hero who fights to protect the English language (or thus he would claim) is that I really ought to at least make the effort to be as correct as possible with my grammar in the comic, and I am not a grammar nut. Granted, there's definitely some leeway with writing dialogue since real people don't always talk perfectly grammatically and they usually manage to understand each other just fine even so. But still, it's the principle of the matter, and, while I think I'm reasonably competent when it comes to writing and stuff (technical term, that, "stuff"), I don't really have any personal pet peeves and I don't really nitpick about the finer points of grammar or things like that. This can make coming up with topics a bit tricky.
Sorry, that was a bit long winded there. Moving onto the actual topic of the moment: irony.
As part of writing this episode of the comic, I did some reading up on definitions of irony to try to make sure I was using the term at least passingly correctly. It seems to me that irony is one of those things which is a bit nebulous: oh, there's definitions and examples and that's all well and good, but it's not something as well defined as, say, 2+2=4, and there seems to be some leeway as to what is or is not considered to be irony.
An example. Some people seem to think that sarcasm is (or can be) a form of verbal irony, but this is by no means universal and not all sarcasm is ironic.
The situation that I have set up in this episode has attempted to employ situational irony -- The Pen has gone to some lengths (to the point of turning off her phone) so that her boss cannot contact her and drag her into some language related escapades but, as today's page shows, language related escapades appear to be happening anyway. Is this ironic? I'm still undecided on the matter, which is why I have the Waitress (real name as yet undetermined) babble a bit about the subject in the final panel.
TLDR version: go look at this other comic which seems to match up with my thoughts on the matter fairly well. Also go read my comic.
Until next time
Freak Out,
-TFitC
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