How can you indicate the use of sarcasm or irony in text? (it's all in the tone you see and it can be very funny when not used as an attack against a person or people)
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ANSWERS: 3
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With a finely tuned sarcasm detector.
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Yes it can be hard sometimes. I've been downrated for answers in the past on here, where I knew I might be because people may not realise I am being sarcastic, but I just take the chance. Texting isn't so bad as I am normally texting people who know I use sarcasm.
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I think that you have to be very careful about the general tone of the writing; but it's a doomed enterprise because it depends on a shared set of references about what is acceptable and what is not. My experience in conversation with Americans is that they do not have the homogeneity of reference that allows irony to be an effective rhetorical device. The effectiveness of Swift's Modest Proposal depends completely on the shared knowledge that his suggestion that the Irish should sell their own children as food is ludicrous and ironical. Barry Humphries had little success in America, I understand, because Dame Edna Everage was not perceived as being an outrageous caricature. I think the same fate befell Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G. In a truly diverse society containing bona fide eccentrics whose behaviour is as extreme as such caricatures as Dame Edna, or Ali G, irony is going to be difficult to convey. It is only in societies in which we all know beforehand what everybody really thinks, or how everybody really behaves that irony can flourish.
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