@RegDwigнt: BTW, if you like "Rhapsody in Blue" you ought to give Porgy and Bess a listen sometime. It is the quintessentially American opera. It's gone through phases, and currently seems out of favor for reasons of political correctness, but it's a stupendous work.
Here's a taste. Serena's song, after her husband is killed in a fight:
@Cerberus Most inimical things kill mostly old people.
Well, except bullets and bombs. They seem to fall disproportionately on those of combat age. And those who obstinately put themselves in the path of this or that army's plans.
What would the typical sentence be if a doctor is peeking into the corridor and sees a person waiting there. "Are you to see me?" or "Are you waiting for me?" or something else?
"I'm to see the doctor at 11" sounds fine, but for some reason it sounds funny the way you've used it for asking a question of someone in the hallway. A little formal or something.
@RegDwigнt Yes. The melodies are so very expressive, but I wouldn't always call them simple. Look at "My Man's Gone Now" for example, and you'll see every line attempting to rise in the beginning, fighting to stay up, yet pulled down and down by grief, with the final note being its lowest point. Brilliant.
So there's a certain rhetorical device I've noticed. I'll describe it by giving a couple of examples.
One is the saying, "You only have to floss the teeth you want to keep."
Presumably, the listener wants to keep all of their teeth, so the implication is that they should floss all of their teeth.
Another example is a directive in a piece of RPG literature: "Offer no surrender that you would not accept."
In context, the reader is expected to understand that they are never supposed to surrender, and so the directive is telling them never to offer surrender, either.
Another example might be, "Don't touch this machine while it's operating if you like having hands."
Or, "I'll only work for your company if I don't have to go anywhere or perform any duties."
> Verbal irony is very common in everyday speech, plays, novels, and poetry, and usually occurs in the form of sarcasm. It depends upon timing and suitable circumstances to achieve its effect. Verbal irony develops funny and dramatic situations.
> Through verbal irony, writers and poets can convey their bitter messages indirectly, in a less bitter and more effective way. It makes a literary piece more effective by provoking readers into analyzing and thinking harder about a situation. By contrasting and comparing suppositions with reality, the readers can better understand the writer’s intent.
@Cerberus Seems that way. But you still owe me a coke, since I cried jinx first.
@Cerberus I think actions could be ironic, even if unstated. For example, in a play, if a person the main character thinks is in Timbuktu appears in an English drawing room behind him without his apparent knowledge, that would be a sort of irony.
I believe it is called dramatic irony because it is the playwright's words that are the opposite of the truth and the audience knows it (definition of irony).
dramatic irony irony that is inherent in speeches or a situation of a drama and is understood by the audience but not grasped by the characters in the play.
In any case, @Cerb, even if situations are set up verbally the irony does not have to be verbal, at least not in the same way that a statement like "You only have to floss the teeth you want to keep" is. There the entire irony is predicated on a turn of phrase.
If I need to talk about the concept of the switching between daylight savings time vs non-daylight savings time, is there a term specific to that?
I can say something like "Tomorrow, we'll change timezones." or "The misunderstanding on delivery time was a timezone issue." because things like EST...
@Robusto Because they're setting up a table in a database or designing a UI where they have to label a field whose possible values are daylight and standard time
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…