What is "ironic"

Usage examples of "ironic".

David and Deborah his manner remained always the same, jestingly ironic, scornfully loquacious, lovingly friendly of a sudden, then for a day, two days, a week utterly silent, while his eyes roved, his ears were acock listening for a step.

But there was some interference from this fellow Bowler, who, with an ironic aptness, seems to regard you as an imperialist.

Elder Eddas, but here is the most ironic of ironies: many can hear the Eddas within themselves but few can understand.

The particularity of exile itself, the artificiality of the constructs by which it is articulated, and the distant, ironic voice of the author all raise problems for readers who can identify neither with the causes of exile nor with the ironic voice of the exiled author.

Which was ironic, of course, because he believed in everything the Ironheads professed.

By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries.

It was so ironic to be protected by the same jundies who an hour ago had been stubbing out their cigarettes on our necks.

He dropped to one knee and cuffed Nora Lutz, thinking it ironic how the silver of the cuffs clashed with the diamond bracelets she wore on both wrists.

Television shows now adopt the ironic humor of much metafiction, and begin to poke fun at themselves, and dramatize their limitations.

Oscar Wilde was a poseur himself, and ironic echoes of my performance extend through my own work and through his.

In an ironic quirk of fate, Soe who had been placed in Berlin because of the criminal actions of another-was put in charge of a smuggling scheme far greater than the one that had gotten him posted to Germany in the first place.

It was ironic, considering the fact that all the other men in the Spumoni family weighed over three hundred pounds and rarely broke a sweat.

If our point-of-view narrator is less articulate or educated or ironic or sympathetic than we are, we may also have to give up our writerly egos, muting our own voice in order to speak through the voice of our narrator.

Ironic that this amplitude of class should be accompanied by such grim individual funneling of effort, convergence toward an existential center.

The lamps that had been left to light the dead would burn on until the oil was consumed - an ironic commentary on the brevity of human life.