Using picture books as mentor texts is the perfect way to teach verbal, dramatic, and situational irony to middle school students.

The study of sarcasm and verbal irony recognition integrates research from linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and psychology to elucidate how humans decode subtle non-literal meanings in ...

JON WINOKUR is the author of 20 reference books and anthologies, including, most recently, "The Big Book of Irony." WHEN it was revealed in 2003 that William J. Bennett, author of “The Book of Virtues ...

From William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “The Book of Mormon,” the power of irony transcends genres and ...

Like simile, metaphor, personification and hyperbole, irony is a very useful figure of speech. Writers and other creative workers regularly make use of it, including comedians. It can, however, also ...

As the great British comic, Ricky Gervais once implied, England and America may not so much be divided by a common tongue, but by their distinctive use (and in the case of the Brits, their abuse) of ...

“WELL, that’s just great.” Quick, what does that sentence mean? Is the speaker acknowledging some good news, celebrating a joyful event that just took place? Do we take the statement at face value? Or ...

Everyone knows that Americans don't understand irony. Soon after moving to England from the U.S., I discovered that my country was universally assumed to be an irony-free zone. I was at a dinner party ...